The following passage from Roosevelt's essay on _History as Literature_ is poetry by virtue of its ecstasy and visualizing effect, though printed in prose form. Roosevelt might have arranged it in the long lines of irregular lengths like those of Whitman into which it fits better than it would into lines of brief, irregular length. But its poetry does not depend upon the rhythms which are in the original prose. It is only one of the few cases where Roosevelt succeeds in being a poet, for he was rather the orator who swayed by rhetoric many of the worst of popular prejudices.
The true historian will bring the past before our eyes as if it were the present . . . Gorgeous in our sight will rise the splendor of dead cities, And the might of the elder empires of which the very ruins crumbled to dust ages ago; Along ancient trade-routes, across the world's waste spaces, its caravans shall move; And the admirals of uncharted seas shall furrow the ocean with their lonely prows, Beyond the dim centuries we shall see the banners float above armed hosts. We shall see conquerors riding forward to victories that have changed the course of time. We shall listen to prophecies of forgotten seers. Ours shall be the dreams of dreamers who dreamed greatly, Who saw in their vision peaks so lofty That never have they been reached By the sons and daughters of men. Dead poets shall sing to us the deeds of men of might And the love and the beauty of women.
Dr. Andrews in his _Writing and Reading of Verse_ has also given us illustrations of rhythmic prose that he has resolved into free verse. Like Professor Patterson, he rightly refuses to recognize free verse as a distinct species of verse, holding it to have an affinity at least to prose.[117:A] He notes that the free verse advocates have not really defined special laws of free verse. He also recommends the would-be practitioners of free verse to study the prose rhythms of men like Pater and De Quincey.
Professor Corson, the Browning scholar, wrote to Walt Whitman that be believed that impassioned prose would be the medium in which the poetry of the future would be written, and that he considered the _Leaves of Grass_ one of the harbingers. The vogue of free verse, which is but impassioned prose, shows that his prophecy is coming true. In England Matthew Arnold and Walter Henley used it. Edward Carpenter had been writing it as a result of Whitman's influence, in _Towards Democracy_ in 1883. In America Horace Traubel, long before the free verse vogue started, had been writing in his _The Conservator_ free verse poems. No one paid attention to these even when some of them were collected in _Optimos_ in 1910, except a few disciples. Richard Hovey, Ernest Crosby, and Stephen Crane had also been writing free verse after Whitman before the year 1900. About 1912 an impetus was given to free verse by the poets of the new poetic era which set in and which Untermeyer calls the _New Era in American Poetry_. Most of the contemporary free verse poets began writing simultaneously.