ABSTRACT
It is an extremely interesting fact that Mr. Morris in exercising his rare poetical gift has so often of late turned from metrical to unmetrical forms. Though his romances must needs be taken as being in some measure the outcome of his studies in Saga literature, they hold, in conception no less than in execution, a place of their own. If the name 'metreless poem' can properly be given to any form of imaginative literature, these romances are more fully entitled to that name than anything that has gone before. In all poetry an indispensable requisite must be form ofsome kind, and what form can there be without metre? The measured prose used by Leconte de Lisle and others is as far removed from poetic art as from prose art, and consequently has perhaps no right of existence at all. In English we have between rhymemeasures and measured prose a magnificent rhymeless movement, our decasyllabic blank verse. The tone of this, however, is so elevated that not even Tennyson has been able to reconcile the English ear to 'familiar blank verse.' Hence the want of another medium is often deeply felt.
