Note 189 — Chapter II · RHYTHM AS THE ESSENTIAL FACT OF POETRY

So M. de la Grasserie asserts in an ingenious account of the retrograde process by which in modern times poetry has retraced its old evolution, passing from verse back through rhythmic prose to prose outright. The only use which he now concedes to verse is in ... the opera. In all other fields,—epic, drama, lyric,—he thinks it is dead as King Pandion.