PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION.
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o this edition of "The Unknown Eros" are added all the other poems I havewritten, in what I venture--because it has no other name--to call"catalectic verse." Nearly all English metres owe their existence asmetres to "catalexis," or pause, for the time of one or more feet, and, asa rule, the position and amount of catalexis are fixed. But the verse inwhich this volume is written is catalectic par excellence, employing thepause (as it does the rhyme) with freedom only limited by the exigenciesof poetic passion. From the time of Drummond of Hawthornden to our own,some of the noblest flights of English poetry have been taken on the wingsof this verse; but with ordinary readers it has been more or lessdiscredited by the far greater number of abortive efforts, on the partsometimes of considerable poets, to adapt it to purposes with which ithas no expressional correspondence; or to vary it by rhythmical movementswhich are destructive of its character. Some persons, unlearned in the subject of metre, have objected to this kindof verse that it is "lawless." But it has its laws as truly as any other.In its highest order, the lyric or "ode," it is a tetrameter, the linehaving the time of eight iambics. When it descends to narrative, or theexpression of a less-exalted strain of thought, it becomes a trimeter,having the time of six iambics, or even a dimeter, with the time of four;and it is allowable to vary the tetrameter "ode" by the occasionalintroduction of passages in either or both of these inferior measures, butnot, I think, by the use of any other. The license to rhyme at indefiniteintervals is counterbalanced, in the writing of all poets who have employedthis metre successfully, by unusual frequency in the recurrence of the samerhyme. For information on the generally overlooked but primarily importantfunction of catalexis in English verse I refer such readers as may becurious about the subject to the Essay printed as an appendix to the latereditions of my collected poems. I do not pretend to have done more than very moderate justice to theexceeding grace and dignity and the inexhaustible expressiveness of whichthis kind of metre is capable; but I can say that I have never attempted towrite in it in the absence of that one justification of and primequalification for its use, namely, the impulse of some thought that"voluntary moved harmonious numbers."
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