Horatio Winslow

“ How far the verse maker will go in clearness and simplicity depends largely on his natural good taste and discrimination. The better he is able to appreciate the work of others the better his own will become, and this appreciation, though it cannot be created, can be cultivated as well as good manners. To-day more than ever before good reading is one of the prime essentials to good writing. ”

“ A first-class exercise is to write verse without rhyme or very much reason, whose only virtue shall be lines of exact length with meter regular to the verge of singsongness. As an exercise, too, it is helpful to take a dozen lines or more of good verse and break them up into feet. The greatest poets are not necessarily the best for this purpose, owing to the irregularity of much of their work. It is better for the beginner to steer clear of Browning and try the simpler and more regular constructions of Dobson and Praed. ”

“ A little harder, but still not too hard, is the limerick, examples of which are given in Chapter IX. As a gift, a series of illustrated limericks on people you know would have the merit of novelty at least.
To see one’s productions in print is always an incentive to better work. The type is cheering even when its legibility reveals several faults unnoticed in [Pg 105] manuscript. Most small newspapers are glad to publish fairly good verse when the poet is willing to let it go for nothing. Be sure that rhyme and meter are correct and then send it in and let the General Public stand from under. ”

“ In taking up verse writing the student must solemnly resolve on one thing: to consider no composition complete until it proves up—until the rhymes and meter are perfect. This “perfection” is not as unattainable as it sounds, for the laws of rhyme and meter are as fixed as the laws of the Medes and the Persians. Any one may not be able to write artistic verse, but any one can write true verse, and the only way to make a course in verse writing count is to live up to all the rules ”

“ Now a general summing up for the verse maker—a summing up that applies just as much to painting or modeling as it does to verse writing.
Remember always that you are your own master and that your highest development must always come from yourself. On all matters of taste you are the court of last resort to decide for the hurt or betterment of your soul. So it is necessary in the beginning to be just with yourself. ”

“ When the verse maker once gets the habit of referring to its pages there is more hope for the amateur popular song writer than for him. Better to think half an hour and get the right word one’s self than to tread the primrose path of the rhyming dictionary. ”

“ Newspapers pay little or nothing for verse except when a special writer is put on the staff to supply a column of verse a day. Occasionally some topical stanza which agrees with the editorial policy will be accepted from an outsider. It may be pointed out here that very often the humor or appropriateness of a production will overbalance faults in the rhyme and meter. In serious verse an exception of this sort will rarely be found and a thing must stand or fall on its real merits. ”

“ Even in your exercises do not tolerate a false rhyme or a line lacking in syllables.
Do not attempt too hard a thing at first. You will only be disappointed. Do not write a ballade until you can write a limerick. Work up gradually.
And you must not become discouraged. If you write day in and day out, you are bound to improve, though the work of Wednesday be no better than that of Tuesday or even of Saturday. Progress goes in jumps. Nine times we fail and on the tenth trial we succeed.
We cannot all be artists but we can all be good workmen. ”

“ The ballade, rondeau and triolet are favorite expressions of this style of verse, for in general its writers seek difficult stanza forms with rhymes natural but never hackneyed.
As an exercise its making is both profitable and difficult. On trial, it will be found no easy matter to write line after line of every-day English into balanced verse that is not commonplace, but once well done it is a much easier task to find a market. ”

“ Lines ending “fain,” “made,” “pain,” “laid” would, of course, be correct, but the similar vowel sounds cause a lack of variety. An arrangement such as “through,” “made,” “drew,” “laid” would be better.
Nothing disgusts the reader of verse more than an imperfect rhyme. If one is anxious to write well he should make it his business to see that every rhyme is absolutely right before a manuscript leaves his hands. Whatever sins may be original with a versifier at least he has no excuse for an unmetrical line or an untrue rhyme. ”

“ Robert Burns, for the swing of his songs and the flavor of his words, should be read continually. Much of his Scotch vocabulary might be used, judiciously, in English verse.
In the “Eve of St. Agnes,” Keats has revealed possibilities in the Spenserian stanza of which Spenser himself was not aware, and the “Ode to a Nightingale” and the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” have a classic beauty which can be recognized though not successfully copied.
Of the more modern poets Browning’s strange, uncouth phrasing is full of power ”

“ There is no market nowadays for the long poem except from writers of established reputation. As a rule the shorter the verse the better its chance of acceptance. Verse humorous is easier to dispose of than verse serious because there is a wider field. Puck, Judge, Life, Smart Set, Ainslee’s, Harper’s, Century, and an army of others are always willing to buy really amusing verse. ”

“ It is only through interest and desire that anything has ever been accomplished, and if these are not sustained the work must stay at a low level. Even the seasoned writer must look forward to his work if he wishes to improve.
For the beginner whose airy verse does not trip but rather lumbers, who is unable to write anything worthy of sale and whose ideas refuse to be crowded into the right number of feet, it might be an excellent thing occasionally to drop [Pg 104] all thought of pentameters and amphibrachs and go back to the old-fashioned rhymed alphabet. ”

“ Serious verse is sold in lesser quantities, but the price is better—when the production is bought by a high-class publication. The Atlantic Monthly is always on the lookout for new writers and other magazines are prompt to recognize what pleases them even in the [Pg 114] work of a newcomer. Perhaps the most standard popular forms of serious verse are the sonnet and the short love lyric.
Many editors are glad to buy quatrains and even couplets to fill out a page when a longer form would be rejected. ”

“ It is an exercise in ingenuity if nothing else and if the writer has any skill at drawing it could be converted into a delightful gift for a five-year-old. Lear, the author of the Nonsense books, did not think it beneath his dignity to write six of these alphabets in varying stanza forms. ”

“ The more appropriate the construction of the poem—the rhymes, the meter and the stanza—the better it will carry out the writer’s intention. Instead of hampering his thought it will assist it.
As a means of becoming acquainted with the wide resources which wait the verse maker, the student should copy and imitate every stanza form not familiar to him. In this way he will learn for himself why the Spenserian stanza used by Keats in his “Eve of St. Agnes” is good for one sort of narrative and why the ballad stanza used by Coleridge in his “Ancient Mariner” is good for another ”

“ For that matter, the songs of all the Elizabethan dramatists are worthy of study and restudy. They have a lilt and a lightness [Pg 97] which make them live even now when so many literary fashions have passed away.
The old English ballads, to be found in Percy’s Reliques, Allingham’s Ballad Book and most collections of English Literature, are a help toward understanding the construction of a spirited narrative poem. Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West” shows how effectively this sort of treatment can be applied to a modern theme. ”

“ The plot of the drama is a thing of no consequence; it may have as much or as little as you choose. Write the scenes as the mood strikes you and when you have lost interest think of it only as an exercise.
[Pg 106] Tennyson’s “Maud” shows how a narrative poem may be treated in a series of lyrics and suggests imitation. The German poets, as well as some English writers, have song cycles, a series of poems all bearing on one central theme. A pedestrian trip; the life of a bird couple; the coming of winter, and innumerable other subjects lie close at hand suitable for such treatment. ”

“ Utilize the line by making it the refrain of a ballade or the ending of some similar verse form. Browning composed his “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” around that single line taken from a song in “King Lear.” It is possible to go even further and with a stanza—say from some Elizabethan song—construct about it the completed poem. Rossetti has done this with one of Ophelia’s songs in “Hamlet.”
But keep up your interest and work [Pg 107] for the love of working. There is drudgery in the learning of anything, but with verse one can at least make it interesting drudgery. Never give up ”

“ As to sonnet construction little can be said here or, if one wished to go into [Pg 52] detail, so much could be said that it would fill this volume a dozen times. Keats, Wordsworth and Rossetti, to say nothing of a dozen or more modern sonneteers, are safe models to follow. One trifling suggestion seems in order. There are so many really good sonnets now that a second-rate production is a drug on the market. Except as an exercise it is altogether superfluous. A first-class sonnet must be grounded first on an idea and then rewritten and worked over until the idea has found a fit setting. ”

“ Alliteration at the beginning of accented syllables is very useful in humorous verse, helping along the rhythm and binding the lines together.
The use of onomatopoetic words, words whose sound signifies the sense, is so common that we seldom give it a thought. ”

“ Though our English verse largely disregards the quantity or length of a syllable, in some lines this must be considered as well as accent. A light meter and stanza may very easily be spoiled by the introduction of a too-strong word. ”

“ And so one might go on for a dozen pages and still have an incomplete list. It is not what one reads but how one reads. The books wait on the shelves and through reading and through reading only can one cultivate that most necessary though indefinable quality—Good Taste. ”

“ A stanza or two may be expanded into a ballade in English containing an elaboration of the [Pg 91] original thought. It is perfectly allowable to offer a composition of this sort for sale provided the source is acknowledged.
[Pg 92]
[Pg 93]
XI ABOUT READING
[Pg 94]
[Pg 95]
CHAPTER XI ABOUT READING To write good verse one must read good verse. The world has spun too long for a man to succeed who depends wholly on his own ideas; he must profit by the work of others. The more poetry and the more kinds of poetry the verse maker reads the broader his knowledge of the subject becomes. ”

“ But nonsense verse is not confined to this one form. Passing from the work of Lear we come to Lewis Carroll’s verse in “Alice in Wonderland.” Nothing of [Pg 82] its kind better than “Jabberwocky” has ever been written, and it would be a bold verse maker who would try to improve on “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” or any of the other “Alice poems.”
In a different way, though perhaps as amusing, is the Gelett Burgess style of nonsense verse typified in his noble quatrain to the Purple Cow:
“I never saw a purple cow,
I never hope to see one ”

“ THE OUTING PRESS
DEPOSIT, N. Y.
[Pg 5]
PREFACE Throughout the following pages “verse” stands for any kind of metrical composition as distinguished from prose. It is not used as a synonym for “poetry.” ”