Quatrains

Abstract

Though Eliot asserted that vers libre did not exist, and had good reason to be confident that his own poetry had not suffered from any freedoms he had employed in the length of lines or incidence of rhyme, he knew as well as Ezra Pound that ‘free verse’ could lead to degeneration in the style of writers who were not constantly alert to the necessity of keeping language alive. In The Criterion of July 1923 Pound inveighs against ‘the general dilution of vers libre, Amygism,¹⁴ Lee Masterism’ and ‘general floppiness’ gone too far, and recommends Théophile Gautier’s Emaux et Camees as a remedy. He probably had the example of Eliot in mind, for the latter began writing poems in Gautier quatrains in 1917. Eliot knew that every type of poetry imposed its own discipline, and that whatever its outward form there was only good poetry or bad. He did not wish to fall into any particular style, as Spenser or Milton had done, knowing as keenly as Gerard Manley Hopkins that self-imitation soon leads to dull ‘Parnassian’. For him every poem was a new beginning, and imposed its own pattern; it was, in the words of ‘East Coker’, ‘a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating’.