Therefore I was eager to learn whether or not she held the opinion--often expressed during the past months--that poetry is becoming more democratic, less an art practised and appreciated by the chosen few. Also I wanted to know if she saw signs of this democratization of poetry in the development of free verse, or _vers libre_, as those who write it prefer to say, in the apparently growing tendency of poets to give up the use of rhyme and rhythm. "Certainly, poetry is steadily growing more democratic," said Mrs. Marks. "More people are writing poetry to-day than fifty years ago, and the appreciation of poetry is more general. Most poets of genuine calling are writing now with the world in mind as an audience, not merely for the entertainment of a little literary cult. "But I do not think that the _vers libre_ fad has any connection with this tendency, or with the development of poetry at all. Indeed, I do not think that the cult is growing; we hear more of it in the United States than we did a year or two ago, but that is chiefly because London and Paris have outworn its novelty, so the _vers libristes_ concentrate their energies on Chicago and New York. "I love some 'free verse.' Certainly, there may be times when a poet finds he can express his idea or his emotion better without rhyme and rhythm than with them. But verse that is ostentatiously free--free verse that obviously has been made deliberately--that is a highly artificial sort of writing, bears no more relation to literature than does an acrostic. Neither the themes nor the methods of those who call themselves _vers libristes_ are democratic; they are, in the worst sense of the word, the sense which came into use at the time of the French Revolution, aristocratic. "The canon of the _vers libristes_ is essentially aristocratic. They contend, absurdly enough, that all traditional forms of rhyme and rhythm constitute a sort of bondage, and therefore they arbitrarily rule them out. Not for them are the fetters that bound Shelley's spirit to the earth! Also they arbitrarily rule out what they call, with their fondness for labels, the 'sociological note,' 'didacticism,' 'meanings'--any ideas or emotions, in fact, that may be called communal or democratic. "My own canon is that all themes are fit for poetry and that all methods must justify themselves. If I may be permitted to make a clumsy wooden-toy apothegm I would say that poetry is rhythmic without and within. If we turn Carlyle's sometimes cloudy prose inside out we find that it has a silver lining of poetry.