Influence of Walt Whitman on the Origin of the "Vers Libre"

Abstract

THE difficult question of the origin of the vers libre, as yet unillumined by thorough investigation, has been made more obscure by a diversity of partial solutions. The free verse movement in France is generally dated from the appearance in 1887 of M. Gustave Kahn's Palais nomades. M. Kahn considers himself the author, and is undeniably the theoriser of the innovation: though it is held that he was preceded in this direction by his friend Jules Laforgue. In his Rapport sur le Mouvement poetique franfais, Catulle Mendes gives the names of some half dozen 'originators'; but his ironical remarks on the free verse movement, with which he was entirely out of sympathy, are not to be taken seriously. M. Robert de Souza, who has made a scientific study of French rhythm mainly from the standpoint of accentuation, traces the origin of the recent 'innovations' back to the mediaeval fountainhead of French versification, and has consequently little to say about the would-be originators of the eighties. While agreeing with this scientific explanation, many of the best verslibristes are content to cite, as the initial inspiration of their own free verse, the vers libe'ie of Paul Verlaine. In the important preface to Palais nomades, M. Kahn explains his own experiment as the culmination of the development of poetic prose from Chateaubriand to Baudelaire and of the prosepoem from Baudelaire to Mallarme. There is probably a large element of truth in all these points of view. But the question cannot be settled without taking into account another suggestion of a different character, namely that modern French free verse owes its origin partly, if not primarily, to foreign influence. This opinion owes something to the fact that a large percentage of the early verslibristes were of foreign extraction. 'Je remarque avec assez d'6tonnement,' said Josd-Maria de Heredia, 'que ce sont des Belges, des Suisses, des Grecs, des Anglais et des Americains qui veulent