Introduction
(or what a French critic
calls "closed" verse, that verse which print bred and which is pretty
much what we have had, in English & American, and have still got, despite
the work of Pound & Williams:
it led Keats, already a
hundred years ago, to see it (Wordsworth's, Milton's) in the light of
"the Egotistical Sublime"; and it persists, at this latter day, as what
you might call the private-soul-at-any-public-wall)
Verse now, 1950, if it is
to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use, must, I take it, catch
up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath,
of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings.
(The revolution of the ear, 1910, the trochee's heave, asks it of the
younger poets.)
I want to do two things:
first, try to show what projective or OPEN verse is, what it involves,
in its act of composition, how, in distinction from the non-projective,
it is accomplished; and II, suggest a few ideas about what stance toward
reality brings such verse into being, what that stance does, both to
the poet and to his reader. (The stance involves, for example, a change
beyond, and larger than, the technical, and may, the way things look,
lead to new poetics and to new concepts from which some sort of drama,
say, or of epic, perhaps, may emerge.)