Free verse may or may not have a cadence all its own, but one feels that those who advocate free verse need not try to prove that it does and must possess a cadence peculiar to itself. Free verse may have great poetic value even though it lacks a unique cadence. Free verse rose into prominence lately because poets wanted to be freed from the bonds of metre. They should not encumber themselves with the shackles of a new prosody.
Let us illustrate our point: we shall take a few lines from a great prose poem by Lafcadio Hearn and arrange them in free verse. It is from the essay called "The Eternal Haunter" in the volume _Exotics and Retrospectives_. The haunter is evidently ancestral memory or the spirit of life in the past.
Ancient her beauty As the heart of man, Yet ever waxing fairer, Forever remaining young. Mortals wither in time As leaves in the frost of autumn; But time only brightens the glow And the bloom of her endless youth. All men have loved her But none shall touch with his lips Even the hem of her garment.
It is seen that this prose passage in the free verse transformance has the cadences which were present before. It is still poetical, as it was in the original version as well. It really matters little if Hearn had written it as it now stands. It is a question of personal preference with the poet, in what form he wishes to write.
Walter P. Eaton, in an article in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for October, 1919, considers the free verse form different from prose. He took a passage from Pater's _Renaissance_ and arranged it in free verse form, and then a passage from Sandburg's free verse and arranged it in prose, and tried unsuccessfully to show that the Pater passage did not become free verse, and that the Sandburg passage did not become good prose. His mistake was in trying to take a passage from Sandburg that had a patterned form, and in arranging the Pater passage into lines that were too brief. But Professor Lowes has taken passages from Pater, Hewlett, Fiona Macleod, Conrad and George Meredith and printed them as free verse, and they truly read like free verse poems.
The votaries of free verse demand a special cadence, but there is hardly any of it in Masters's poems in the _Spoon River Anthology_ which could have been printed as prose passages. They would have been just as good and poetical as they are in free verse, but Masters has the right to make any arrangement he wanted. Ecstasy is more important than cadence, and he has ecstasy.