Too often they are viewed from the standpoint of a contemptuous modernism. Evidently their verse is more nearly contemporary with Ronsard than with Jean Cocteau, but this need not be to their discredit; no one has the right to proclaim that after four o'clock on the morning of Monday, November 11, such and such stanzas may no longer be written. The Georgians cling to the old prosody; they should be criticized under the laws of the old prosody, and it is precisely this criticism which is entitled to be most harsh.
Squire and Freeman take too many liberties. Keats allowed himself extra syllables in his iambic pentameter; Squire writes in succession two fourteen-syllable lines. Keats used an occasional hexameter; Freeman introduces them without discretion. He writes broken lines, stands false rhymes beside stale rhymes, and often counts the past tense of the verb as an extra syllable in cases where the familiar language of the passage does not justify this licence. In other words his verse (not all of it, of course, but the bulk) has the same relation to the great romanticists that the dramatic blank verse of 1640 had to that of 1603. Thus Freeman, from the stand- point of his style, is the deliquescence of Keats; his verse, like most of Squire's, is the opposite of good vers libre, which adheres strictly to another law.
In poetry every variation from the norm must justify itself. Every syllable in a line beyond the prescribed eight or ten must be introduced with a definite purpose. One could not read over a page of E. A. Robinson, for example, and strike out words indiscriminately, but often with Squire or Freeman one can delete a score of the's, of and's and but's, of indiscriminate adjectives, and thereby clarify not only the metre but the expression. The redundancy of D. H. Lawrence often heightens his effects; he is like a man stuttering with emotion. When Frost is jagged it is because he has tried to be simple and precise. But Squire and Freeman take liberties without paying for them. With no more to say than Tennyson they have no excuse for not writing with equal correctness.
Poetry is an exact art; it is the art of expressing the infinite in a limited number of words. There is somewhat the same difference between prose and poetry that there is between a letter and a cable-gram; in poetry every word must pay for itself. John Freeman when he says:
