All outdoors is just what _vers libre_ affords the poet of today. He is no longer under the necessity of moulding his thought into an artificial pattern, compressing it to a predetermined form; it can remain fluent, unsubjugated, formless, like a spontaneous emotional cry. No longer need he accept such fatal and stereotyped bondage as that under which Milton labored when the iron mechanics of blank verse forced him to standardize, to conventionalize, his emotion in such lines as— O dark dark dark amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse Without all hope of day!... To be honest, we must admit that there was something sickly and soul-destroying about the earlier verse-forms. The too-honeyed sweetness and metrical constraint of _Paradise Lost_ has always secretly repelled the true judge of poetry; and Shakespeare’s Sonnets have never been thoroughly satisfactory just because of the fatal necessity under which the author worked, of rhyming his lines in conformity with a fixed order. How could spiritual originality survive such an ordeal? It would be unwise, however, to condemn the whole body of past poets; for certain of the earlier practitioners did, in their rudimentary way, see the light. Milton in _Sampson Agonistes_, in the midst of passages of the old-fashioned regular blank verse, introduced several choruses in _vers libre_; and these could perhaps hardly be surpassed by any English or American poet now living. As everyone knows, Walt Whitman (see _The Poets of Barbarism_ by George Santayana) used _vers libre_ profusely. In fact, there extends backward from us an unbroken chain of distinguished _vers libre_ tradition, through Whitman, Matthew Arnold, Southey, Shelley, Milton, and many others; the chain ends only with that first “probably arboreal” singer just antedating the first discoverer of regular rhythm. _Vers libre_ is as old as the hills, and we shall always have it with us. The one defect of the earlier practitioners of _vers libre_ was that they did not have the wit to erect it into a cult. They used the free form only when it seemed to them essentially appropriate to the matter:—that is to say, they used it sporadically, desultorily. Today we know better. Today we know that the free form must be used ever and always. _In hoc signo vinces!_ As a modern poet admirably says— Those envious outworn souls Whose flaccid academic pulses Beat to no rythms of more Dionysiac scope Than metronomes,— Or dollar-twenty-five alarm-clocks,— They will forever Cavail at novelty, at beauty, at freshness; But, hell!— But, a thousand devils!— But, _Henri Quatre_ and the _Pont Neuf_!— We of the new age, who leap upon the mountains like goats upon the heaps of tin cans in the vacant lots, and butt the stars,— We know they are liars, And that we are what we are.