Like their predecessors in the earlier Romantic school, the new adventurers have notoriously experimented with poetic form.  France, the home of the most rigid and meticulous metrical tradition, had already led the way in substituting for the strictly measured verse the more loosely organized harmonies of rhythmical prose, bound together, and indeed made recognizable as verse, in any sense, solely by the rhyme.  With the Symbolists ‘free verse’ was an attempt to capture finer modulations of music than the rigid frame of metre allowed.  With their successors it had rather the value of a plastic medium in which every variety of matter and of mood could be faithfully expressed.  But whether called verse or not, the vast rushing modulations of rhythmic music in the great pieces of Claudel and others have a magnificence not to be denied.  And the less explicitly poetic form permits matter which would jar on the poetic instinct if conveyed through a metrical form to be taken up as it were in this larger and looser stride.

In Germany, on the other hand, the rhythmic emancipation of Whitman was carried out, in the school of Arno Holz, with a revolutionary audacity beyond the example even of Claudel.  Holz states with great clearness and trenchancy what he calls his ‘new principle of lyric’; one which ’abandons all verbal music as an aim, and is borne solely by a rhythm made vital by the thought struggling through it to expression’.  Rhyme and strophe are given up, only rhythm remains.

Of our Georgian poetry, it must suffice to note that here, too, the temper of adventure in form is rife.  But it shows itself, characteristically, less in revolutionary innovation than in attempts to elicit new and strange effects from traditional measures by deploying to the utmost, and in bold and extreme combinations, their traditional resources and variations, as in the blank verse of Mr. Abercrombie and Mr. Bottomley.  This, and much beside in Georgian verse, has moods and moments of rare beauty.  But, on the whole, verse-form is the region of poetic art in which Georgian poetry as a whole is least secure.

3. The New Realism

We see then how deeply rooted this new freedom is in the passion for actuality; not the dream but the waking and alert experience throbs and pulses in it.  We have now to look more closely into this other aspect of it.  Realism is a hard-worked term, but it may be taken to imply that the overflowing vitality of which poetry is one expression fastens with peculiar eagerness upon the visible and tangible world about us and seeks to convey that zest in words.  Our poets not only do not scorn the earth to lose themselves in the sky; they are positive friends of the matter-of-fact, and that not in spite of poetry, but for poetry’s sake; and Pegasus flies more freely because ‘things’ are ‘in the saddle’ along with the poet.