Lovecraft, H P - Metrical Regularity

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Metrical Regularity

by H.P. Lovecraft

"Deteriores omnus sumus licentia." - Terence

Of the various forms of decadence manifest in the poetical art of the present age, none

strikes more harshly on our sensibilities than the alarming decline in that harmonious

regularity of metre which adorned the poetry of our immediate ancestors.

That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even

the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish. As old a

critic as Dionysius of Halicarnassus and as modern an philosopher as Hegel have each

affirmed that versification in poetry is not alone a necessary attribute, but the very

foundation as well; Hegel, indeed, placing metre above metaphorical imagination as the

essence of all poetic creation.

Science can likewise trace the metrical instinct from the very infancy of mankind, or even

beyond, to the pre-human age of the apes. Nature is in itself an unending succession of

regular impulses. The steady recurrence of the seasons and of the moonlight, the coming

and going of the day, the ebb and flow of the tides, the beating of the heart and pulses, the

tread of the feet in walking, the countless other phenomena of like regularity, have all

combined to inculcate in the human brain a rhythmic sense which is as manifest in the

most uncultivated, as in the most polished of peoples. Metre, therefore, is no such false

artifice as most exponents of radicalism would have us believe, but is instead a natural

and inevitable embellishment to poesy, which succeeding ages should develop and refine,

rather than maim or destroy.

Like other instincts, the metric sense has taken on different aspects among different races.

Savages show it in its simplest form while dancing to the sound of primitive drums;

barbarians display it in their religious and other chantings; civilized peoples utilize it for

their formal poetry, either as measured quantity, like that of Greek and Roman verse, or

as measured accentual stress, like that of our own English verse. Precision of metre is

thus no mere display of meretricious ornament, but a logical evolution from eminently

natural sources.

It is the contention of the ultra-modern poet, as enunciated by Mrs. J. W. Renshaw in her

recent article on "The Autocracy of Art," (The Looking Glass for May) that the truly

inspired bard must chant forth his feelings independently of form or language, permitting

each changing impulse to alter the rhythm of his lay, and blindly resigning his reason to

the "fine frenzy" of his mood. This contention is of course founded upon the assumption

that poetry is super-intellectual; the expression of a "soul" which outranks the mind and

its precepts. Now while avoiding the impeachment of this dubious theory, we must needs

remark that the laws of Nature cannot so easily be outdistanced. However much true

poesy may overtop the produce of the brain, it must still be affected by natural laws,

which are universal and inevitable. Wherefore it is the various clearly defined natural

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Lovecraft, H P - Metrical Regularity

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