For, after all, if I were to agree with Professor Gass that poetry (as a part of literature) is not a fine art, it would be because I think it more than a fine art. Because I think the function of poetry is not merely to be a verbal picture art or a verbal music art, but to be an organon of reconciliation between art and life. The best poems, I think, will be found to be those which alter our consciousness in such a way that our inward, and even our outward, lives are altered. The poet sees the world as we do not see it. Consequently, he can put a new complexion on it for us. The world is pluralistic, and so are we. Intellectually we may be of the twentieth century, but emotionally we may be born out of our due season. Then let the poet of that due season mediate to us the emotional life that we need. Living in America, we may, through him, reach Greece or India. By his aid we may conquer the real world; by his aid we may flee from it if it threatens to conquer us. By his aid alone we may get outside of our own skins and into the very heart of the world. What, then, shall we say, when poetry offers to conduct us into a world of growing sieves, slim squares, powdered souls, cool, colorless struggles, the obstetrical adventures of white throats, and green and yellow dins? I have heard of a book which explains the fourth dimension. If I ever get a chance to read that book, and if I find that I can understand the fourth dimension, I shall have another shot at the appreciation of this poetry. For I have a slumbering shadow of a pale-gray idea (if I, too, may wax poetic) that in the sphere of the fourth dimension a slim square would be a perfectly possible conception. I shall arise and go home now and read some poems by the late Mr. Meredith who is popularly supposed to be obscure. In Defense of Vers Libre ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE (_A reply to “Spiritual Dangers of Writing Vers Libre” by Eunice Tietjens in the November issue of The Little Review_) The properly qualified judge of poetry can have no doubts about _vers libre_; if he doubts it, he is no judge. He belongs to that class of hide-bound conservatives who are unwilling to discard the old merely because it is old. He does not yet understand that the newest is always the best. Worst of all, he does not appreciate the value of Freedom. Freedom is the greatest of boons to the artist. The soul of the artist must not be hampered by unnecessary constraints. The old fixed verse-forms—such as the sonnet, blank verse, and all the other familiar metres—were exactly as cramping to the free creating spirit of the poet as the peculiar spaces and arches of the Sistine Chapel were to the designing instinct of Michael Angelo. Lamentable misfortune! that his Sibyls had to occupy those awkward corners. How much would they not have gained in grandeur could they have had all outdoors to expand in!