The Rise and Fall of Meter : Poetry and English National Culture, 1860--1930

Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and inherently nontraditional field, "English meter" concerned issues of personal and national identity, class, education, patriotism, militarism, and the development of English literature as a discipline. The Rise and Fall of Meter tells the unknown story of English meter from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I. Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, Meredith Martin shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, and Robert Bridges used meter to negotiate their relationship to England and the English language; George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold, and Henry Newbolt worried about the rise of one metrical model among multiple competitors. The pressure to conform to a stable model, however, produced reactionary misunderstandings of English meter and the culture it stood for. This unstable relationship to poetic form influenced the prose and poems of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Alice Meynell. A significant intervention in literary history, this book argues that our contemporary understanding of the rise of modernist poetic form was crucially bound to narratives of English national culture. Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms __iamb__ and __trochee__? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and inherently nontraditional field, “English meter” concerned issues of personal and national identity, class, education, patriotism, militarism, and the development of English literature as a discipline. This book tells the unknown story of English meter from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I. Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, the book shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, and Robert Bridges used meter to negotiate their relationship to England and the English language; George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold, and Henry Newbolt worried about the rise of one metrical model among multiple competitors. The pressure to conform to a stable model, however, produced reactionary misunderstandings of English meter and the culture it stood for. This unstable relationship to poetic form influenced the prose and poems of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Alice Meynell. A significant intervention in literary history, this book argues that our contemporary understanding of the rise of modernist poetic form was crucially bound to narratives of English national culture. Introduction: the failure of meter Modern instability Metrical communities Meter as culture A note on historical prosody The history of meter A metrical history of England A grammatical history of England Grammatical instability Metrical instability The stigma of meter Metrical irrelevance The British empire of letters Marking instress Acute stress in "The wreck of the Deutschland" Mistrusting the ear The institution of meter Metrical mastery Inventing the "Britannic" Dynamic reading Mastery for the masses The English ear A prosodic entity The discipline of meter Patriotic pedagogy Matthew Arnold's metrical intimacy Henry Newbolt's cultural metrics Private meters, public rhythms The sound of the drum The trauma of meter Wartime, poetics Sad death for a poet! Therapeutic measures Bent-double The kindred points of heaven and home The before- and afterlife of meter Metrical modernism Make it old : Robert Bridges and obsolescence Alice Meynell's "English metres" Toward a critical prosody. This title tells the unknown story of English meter from the late 18th century until just after World War I. Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, Martin shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity Introduction: The Failure Of Meter -- The History Of Meter -- The Stigma Of Meter -- The Institution Of Meter -- The Discipline Of Meter -- The Trauma Of Meter -- The Before- And Afterlife Of Meter. Meredith Martin. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 241-259) And Index. Uncovering the unexplored archive in the history of poetics, the author shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity.