that we do not see the picture any more, it has become only
another word for dawn. The poet must be constantly seeking new pictures
to make his readers feel the vitality of his thought.

Many of the poems in this volume are written in what
the French call "Vers Libre", a nomenclature more suited
to French use and to French versification than to ours. I prefer to call them
poems in "unrhymed cadence", for that conveys their exact meaning
to an English ear. They are built upon "organic rhythm",
or the rhythm of the speaking voice with its necessity for breathing,
rather than upon a strict metrical system. They differ from
ordinary prose rhythms by being more curved, and containing more stress.
The stress, and exceedingly marked curve, of any regular metre
is easily perceived. These poems, built upon cadence, are more subtle,
but the laws they follow are not less fixed. Merely chopping
prose lines into lengths does not produce cadence, it is constructed upon
mathematical and absolute laws of balance and time. In the preface
to his "Poems", Henley speaks of "those unrhyming rhythms in which
I had tried to quintessentialize, as (I believe) one scarce can do in rhyme."
The desire to "quintessentialize", to head-up an emotion
until it burns white-hot, seems to be an integral part of the modern temper,
and certainly "unrhymed cadence" is unique in its power of expressing this.

Three of these poems are written in a form which, so far as I know,
has never before been attempted in English. M. Paul Fort is its inventor,
and the results it has yielded to him are most beautiful and satisfactory.
Perhaps it is more suited to the French language than to English.
But I found it the only medium in which these particular poems
could be written. It is a fluid and changing form, now prose, now verse,
and permitting a great variety of treatment.