And yet--and yet-- There is a poem of Paul Verlaine dedicated to Anatole France which speaks like one wounded well nigh past enduring by the voices of the scoffers. Ah, les Voix, mourez done, mourantes que vous êtes Sentences, mots en vain, metaphores mal faites, Toute la rhétorique en fuite des péchés, Ah, les Voix, mourez done, mourantes que vous êtes! . . . . Mourez parmi la voix terrible de l'Amour! . . . . PAUL VERLAINE To turn suddenly to the poetry of Paul Verlaine from the mass of modern verse is to experience something like that sensation so admirably described by Thoreau when he came upon a sentence in Latin or in Greek lying like a broken branch of lovely fresh greenery across the pages of some modern book. Verlaine more than any other European poet is responsible for the huge revolution in poetry which has taken in recent times so many and so surprising shapes and has deviated so far from its originator's method. There is little resemblance between the most striking modern experiments in what is called "free verse" and the manner in which Verlaine himself broke with the old tradition; but the spirit animating these more recent adventures is the spirit which Verlaine called up from the "vasty deep," and with all their divergence from his original manner these modern rebels have a perfect right to use the authority of his great name, "car son nom," as Coppée says, in his tenderly written preface to his "Choix de Poésies," "éveillera toujours le souvenir d'une poésie absolument nouvelle et qui a pris dans les lettres franchises l'importance d'une découverte." The pleasure with which one returns to Verlaine from wandering here and there among our daring contemporaries is really nothing less than a tribute to the essential nature of all great poetry; I mean to the soul of music in the thing. Some of the most powerful and original of modern poets have been led so far away from this essential soul of their own great art as to treat the music of their works as quite subordinate to its intellectual or visual import. As far as I am able to understand the theories of the so-called "imagists," the idea is to lay the chief stress upon the evocation of clearly outlined shapes--images clean-cut and sharply defined, and, while personal in their choice, essentially objective in their rendering--and upon the absence of any traditional "beautiful words" which might blur this direct unvarnished impact of the poet's immediate vision.