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

Robert Bridges’s experimental and dynamic poetic forms (and his discussions of these forms) were central to the changing perception of English meter from the late Victorian to the postwar period. Bridges’s role in the prosody wars, in particular, complicates the accepted narrative of the rise of free verse, and shows how the consolidated concept of traditional meters was challenged not only from the modernist avant-garde but also from poets who had been expanding the concept of English meter throughout the late nineteenth century. The dynamism of meter in English and Bridges’s deep commitment, not unlike that of Ezra Pound’s, to mastering various English traditions and to creating an English verse form that could accommodate foreign languages is evident in his innovations in multiple metrical forms. Whereas Hopkins receives most of the attention from scholars eager to find a “protomodernist” in the late nineteenth century, in many ways Bridges, whose late career spanned the heyday of high Modernism, has been overlooked as a poet whose experimental approaches to English meter were in conversation with the experiments of the avant-garde. But also important is the fact that Bridges was in conversation with the institutions of the English school system. For Bridges, English meter in its multiple forms was a mediating force to be mastered, a symbol of difficulty overcome, and a changing yet traditional representative of an idea of English literature that challenged the sciences and displaced the classics as the proper discipline of study for an English gentleman. Contrasting Bridges with his influential competitor, George Saintsbury, reveals the contested landscape of the Edwardian and Georgian prosody wars, which have been largely ignored or suppressed in favor of the more convenient narrative of the rise of free verse. The personal, institutional, and national stakes of these prosody wars are clear in Bridges’s poems but, most especially, in the prosodic writing of these two important, and generally overlooked, figures.

This chapter begins with a sustained look at the relationship between Hopkins’s and Bridges’s approach to prosodic practice and, especially, poetic mastery. I then turn to an examination of Bridges’s dynamic thinking about English and classical prosody over the course of his long career, before arguing that despite the multiple and competing theories with which Hopkins and Bridges experimented, the prosodic work of historian and journalist Saintsbury, whose career runs parallel to Bridges, necessarily simplifies the story of English prosody for institutional and ideological reasons. Sainstbury’s promotion and institutionalization of the foot-based system of scansion (a system that made little or no sense to many practicing poets of the time) is just one of the reasons that the meter of English poetry seemed as if it had one history and one overarching form to those poets devoted to rebelling against it. It was, I suggest, less the meter itself and more the ideological associations to which Saintsbury was committed that inspired many poets to think that meter was inexorably associated with a certain kind of Englishness. In chapter 4, I continue along these lines, showing how the institutionalization of a differently ideological, but still nationalistic, brand of Englishness was prevalent in the state-funded school system and developed into a fetishizing of a native English “beat.”

Bridges’s privileged classical education at Eton and Oxford influenced his reception as a poet and critic. For instance, literary historian David Perkins writes in 1976 that Bridges’s “emphasis on tradition, consciousness, and criticisms as essential elements in the creative process were fostered more by the classics than by current excitements,”¹ and a review in 1889 foreshadowed his reception in the early twentieth century and beyond, naming his work (and character) “austere, classical, precise, reticent.”² The term “classical” refers here not only to his education but also to his careful approach to poetic process. It is tempting to read Bridges as a static figure that provides both a traditional and aristocratic backdrop against which the modernists outlined their own distinctive art. Indeed, from Bridges’s Victorian education to his seemingly detached wartime anthology, The Spirit of Man (1916), we see a figure whose public persona is committed to ideas of poetic and civic order, seemingly untouched by the poetic cultures of the 1910s. But Bridges’s attempts to reform the way students studied English poetry and his frustration that he could not affect change were deepened and redirected once he became poet laureate in 1913. Though he failed to influence a large reading public with his new approaches to poetic form until just before his death, his revisions of the influential and controversial book, Milton’s Prosody, as well as his own commitment to publishing poems in a number of new and experimental forms—along with the apparatus of footnotes and explanatory prefaces—shows that, although he did not succeed in changing the way poetry was taught, he seldom succumbed to any expectation that there was only one tradition through which poetic form should be read. What sets Bridges apart from other Victorian poets who were experimenting with poetic form is that he was innovating in order to standardize, in many ways, a more complex model for English meter. He, like the modernists, believed that the old forms were “worn out,” but thought that they could still be refreshed, properly understood, and reshaped to accommodate the dynamic and polyglossial future of poetry that was being imagined in the early twentieth century. Perkins notes that, though Bridges’s poems seem “curiously empty,” his popular Shorter Poems in 1884 contained no two poems in the same verse form, and Edmund Gosse assigns to Bridges the first specimens of the triolet printed in English.³ But it was not only his command of foreign verse forms in English that demonstrates Bridges’s importance as a metrical experimenter: it was his insistence that the English language itself was a treasure house of unrealized metrical and poetic potential that had been misunderstood and, more importantly, mistaught. His poetic career and the fate of that career today illustrates how the rise of English as a discipline both shaped and reshaped the character of English prosody by suppressing the various English metrical histories that Bridges hoped to restore, remake, and make available to poets in the twentieth century.

Around the same time that Hopkins sent Bridges “Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves” (1886), Hopkins also sent Bridges a translation, in Latin, of a poem from Bridges’s own sonnet sequence, The Growth of Love, which Bridges began ten years earlier in 1876 (the year after Hopkins composed “The Wreck of the Deutschland”). Bridges’s sonnet is, like many of the poems in the collection, about his love for his wife and about the tradition and perceived constraints of writing a sonnet sequence. He writes in sonnet one, “Behold me, now that I have cast my chains, / Master of the art which for thy sake I serve” (l. 14).⁴ This poem was a leitmotif in their letters; a poem to which Hopkins suggested revisions multiple times. Perhaps perfecting it, somewhat, by translating it into Latin in 1886 (from the original 1876 edition which, MacKenzie notes, Hopkins had imperfectly memorized for his translation),⁵ Hopkins’s gesture (as well as his final poem, “To R.B.”) shows Bridges’s importance as the one reader who might still master a new metrical system for England and who could, Hopkins hoped, read his verses with a kindred eye.

In Bridges’s sonnet, the beloved’s passionate voice can penetrate the ear like the prow of a boat cutting through water: “Ah! But her launchèd passion when she sings / Wins on the hearing like a shapen prow / Borne by the mastery of its urgent wings / Or, if she deign her wisdom she doth show / She hath intelligence of heavenly things / Unsullied by man’s mortal overthrow” (ll. 9–10). The awkward mixed metaphor (a boat with wings?) hardly clangs since the romantic notion of a voice “taking flight” with passion or song seems so commonplace. The way the song “wins” the ear is significant, because Hopkins’s first objection to this poem is the fact that Bridges’s song does not win his ear, though it may trick his eye. Hopkins writes: the “barbarous rhyme of prow and show: I can’t abide bad rhymes and when they are spelt alike I hate them more.”⁶

Despite specific criticisms like those addressing the sonnet about which he seemed to obsess, Hopkins praised the twenty-four sonnets that would make up The Growth of Love much more generously than Bridges had responded to “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Hopkins writes: “[t]he sonnets are truly beautiful, breathing a grave and feeling genius, and make me proud of you.” After a few more quibbles Hopkins moves to a discussion of Bridges’s rhythm: “About the rhythm. You certainly have the gift and vein of it, but have not quite reached your perfection. Most of your Miltonic rhythms (which by the way are not so very marked as your letter led me to suppose they would be, and I think many modern poets employ them, don’t they?) are fine” (34–38).

Hopkins continues with a discussion of Milton’s prosody (“I have paid much attention to Milton’s rhythm”), writing that he is thinking about writing something about the remarkable choruses of Samson Agonistes: “I think I have mastered them.” Hopkins mentions the paper by J. A. Symonds, “The Blank Verse of Milton,”⁷ as part of an ongoing interest in the prosody of Milton that he and Bridges shared. Both Hopkins and Bridges were working on rhythmic experiments (“you will see that my rhythms go further than yours do in the way of irregularity,” writes Hopkins), experimenting with a new system that they wanted to master. Bridges writes to his friend Lionel Muirhead about his revisions to the first twenty-four sonnets as early as 1878: “They will be better than anything I have done, and 2 of them are I hope successful in a new metrical system of which I hope great things.”⁸ Mention of the new system leads to a discussion of Hopkins, but he returns to his new ideas for the revisions and expansions of The Growth of Love, closing the letter by saying that the new poems will provide an “[e]ntirely new system of rhythm introduced into sonnett-writing. [sic] See what excitements we have.”⁹ Bridges’s enthusiasm for the “entirely new system of rhythm” mirrors Hopkins’s description of sprung rhythm in his author’s preface (which Hopkins wrote in 1883 “or not much later”),¹⁰ in which he comments that “the rhythm in which the following poem is written is new,”¹¹ and, as he says in his 1878 letter to Dixon, “I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realized on paper.”¹² Critics have discussed how both poets were experimenting with sprung rhythm, though Bridges’s experiments with rhythm were not limited to Hopkins’s system; indeed, Bridges’s concept of metrical mastery extended beyond the “new system” that he and Hopkins were inventing. Whereas Hopkins’s focused on traditional meter and sprung rhythm, Bridges’s investigations of Milton produced both accentual and syllabic verse experiments. From the beginning of his poetic career, Bridges was able to investigate and attempted to master and stabilize multiple metrical systems, recognizing them as distinct and endeavoring to explain his understanding of these multiple systems to a wider audience.

Though Bridges had published at least two poems in sprung rhythm by 1880 (“On a Dead Child” and “London Snow”) that became widely known, the poem, titled simply “Sonnet” in his 1879 collection Poems, is a direct conversation with Hopkins on the issue of metrical mastery.¹³ Donald Stanford has noted that the four accentual poems Bridges published in this volume were distinguished by their small type, a practice Bridges continued in his 1880 edition of Poems.¹⁴ Though these poems could be scanned according to an accentual-syllabic model, Bridges’s practice of signaling his experiments with different types shows that he is also indicating the variety of verse forms possible in English—a pedagogical practice that he will continue throughout the course of his career.

MacKenzie speculates that Hopkins composed “The Windover” in 1877 and gave it to Bridges sometime in the middle of 1878, so it is possible that both Bridges’s Sonnet 22 and Hopkins’s “The Windhover” may be read productively in conjunction; Bridges was actively corresponding with Hopkins about “The Windhover” between 1878 and 1884.¹⁵ Whereas “The Windhover” has become the most famous of Hopkins’s entire oeuvre, and a favorite of critics, few have noticed the way that the poem is in dialogue with Bridges’s sonnet.¹⁶ In Hopkins’s sonnet, the bird of the title, a windhover or a kestrel (falcon), is an allegory for Christ and for poetic inspiration. In the last two lines of the octave, Hopkins writes, “[m]y heart in hiding / Stírred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mástery of the thing” (l. 8).¹⁷ Written only a year after he completed “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” with its destabilizing opening salvo, “[t]hou mastering me, God,” (in which we do not know which two syllables to emphasize according to Hopkins’s own rules of the meter) the “mastery of the thing” here refers to Christ’s mastery in creating the falcon, to the falcon’s mastery of his flight (able to balance on its wings, stationary, as it rebuffs the “big wind,” two words with diacritical marks for emphasis), but also to metrical mastery.

THE WINDHOVER

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, 5

As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird,— the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion 10

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

If we read Hopkins’s poems right, we will experience the “beauty and valour and act” that he witnessed, and the flash of beauty, the inscape of the poem, will be visible to us. Despite Hopkins’s equivocation about his poetic vocation (whether he should be able to master the writing of poetry or whether that distracted him from his Jesuit calling, as well as how to reconcile those two important impulses), “The Windhover” is an ars poetica of how we might catch the beauty of Christ, ourselves, if we too are able to “master” the meter of this particular sonnet.

Hopkins revised “The Windhover” meter many times; as the manuscripts show, he crossed out “sprung” rhythm to write “falling / riding paeonic rhythm”; he changed the great colon between “big : wind” to two diacritical marks in line 7, and he added “the achieve of” in place of a dash: “stirred for a bird—for the mastery of the thing.” Like “Buckle” and “chevalier,” the “thing” has an exclamation point in all of the drafts. The chevalier is commonly read as Christ, and “Buckle” (the subject of many an exegesis) is the central crux of the poem, commonly read as the bird’s dive downward after its suspension in air. But the “thing,” I want to suggest, is not only the mastery, the achievement of Christ, of the bird, but also, as we witness the poet wrestling with the instability of his system (perhaps sprung, perhaps, significantly, falling, bird-like, despite a rhythm that seems to rise), he celebrates his own achievement, his own possible mastery. After all, he wrote to Bridges in 1879, “I shall shortly send you an amended copy of ‘The Windhover:’ the amendment only touches a single line, I think, but as that is the best thing I ever wrote I shd. like you to have it in its best form.”¹⁸ Hopkins wants admiration for his mastery in the poem as he admired Christ’s mastery through the image of the bird; could a new rhythm stir a reader’s heart “in hiding” toward seeing something beyond what is described in the poem?

In Bridges’s “Sonnet—I Would Be a Bird,” written concurrently with Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” Bridges turns the bird trope on its head, as if to signal the particular kind of formal awareness that both he and Hopkins bring to their poems.¹⁹ Rather than the location of conventional song, the birds in “The Windhover” and Bridges’s “Sonnet—I Would Be a Bird” are both symbols and considerations of metrical mastery. In Bridges’s interpretation, he is not observing the mastered bird but has himself replaced the bird by mastering its form. Unlike Hopkins’s observation, “I caught this morning’s minion,” in “The Windhover,” here, the conditional “would be” of the first line also expresses an ambivalent desire, imagined in the octave as a bird metaphor that has no problem in a variety of climates:

I would be a bird, and straight on wings I arise,
And carry purpose up to the ends of air:
In calm and storm my sails I feather, and where
By freezing cliffs the unransom’d wreckage lies:
Or, strutting on hot meridian banks, surprise 5
The silence: over plains in the moonlight bare
I chase my shadow, and perch where no bird dare
In treetops torn by fiercest winds of the skies.

The most “sprung” moments of these first two lines are at the beginning, when Bridges sets up a series of what feel like trisyllabic substitutions, conventionally called anapests: I would be a bird, and straight on wings I arise. The emphasis on “bird” and the lack of stress on both pronouns “I” folds the “I” into the action of “arise,” so that the subject is at once imagining the bird but also mimetically putting the bird’s flight into the rising vowel sounds—Bridges is already experimenting with the phonetic effects that he explored in greater detail later in his career. Though not conventionally “sprung” in the sense of putting stressed syllables beside one another, the anapest in the middle of line 2 similarly hurries the bird’s purpose, and the poem’s, through the unstressed syllables after “up” to the end of the line:

“[U]p” is suspended, midline, just before the line swerves into “to the ends of air.” Of course “air” is already in “carry,” so the meter itself is “carried” by the internal rhyming in the line. “In calm and storm my sails I feather, and where” seems a syntactic inversion for no other reason than to suspend the final two syllables “and where” as if on a cliff, and similarly, the setup of “surprise” in line 5 seems expressively perched as if to make us aware of the metrical movement, the shifty, slightly crooked flight, rife with internal assonance and consonance, of the bird-poet. The octave struts expressively that it can contain both slightly experimental lines and a number of regular lines. Whereas Bridges could flaunt the experiment more, he is tentative with the slightly accentual rhythm in the octave. Hopkins responded to these accentual experiments in February of 1879, writing, “the pieces in sprung rhythm—do not quite satisfy me. They do read tentative, experimental; I cannot well say where the thought is distorted by the measure, but that it is distorted I feel by turning from these to other pieces, where the mastery is so complete.”²⁰ It is as if Bridges does not want to admit that he does not yet have mastery over this experimental new rhythmic form moving, instead, toward his own (more phonetic) exploration of the speeding and slowing effects of accent. But he writes his desire for mastery by imagining it in the sestet (ll. 9–14):

Poor simple birds, foolish birds! then I cry,
Ye pretty pictures of delight, unstir’d 10
By the only joy of knowing that ye fly;
Ye are nót what ye are, but rather, sum’d in a word,
The alphabet of a god’s idea, and I
Who master it, I am the only bird.

Rather like a salvo, the sestet here turns the poet-as-bird into a writer who observes the desire to step back from the form with which he is working. Unlike the vision of “The Windhover,” which stirs the poet’s and reader’s heart out of hiding, the sestet draws our attention to the simple conventions of the sonnet and the bird trope and steps outside of its own metaphoric realm.

Beginning with two stressed syllables in a row: “Poor simple birds!” followed by an extra unstressed syllable, there is a stumble at the end after the comma, with “Foolish birds, then I cry.” Emphasizing “cry” more forcefully because of the comma and the parallel rocking stressed-unstressed-stressed pattern preceding it (which we could just as easily read as another anapest), the rhythm continues to deemphasize the “I” to focus on what the bird, on what the bird’s form, or the bird-as-form, cannot experience. Unlike the typical Shelleyan bird trope of the poetic voice taking flight to the heavens, here Bridges disdains how the birds, mere “pretty pictures of delight,” remain “unstir’d,” knowing only the joy of flight, but none of the accomplishment. Whereas Hopkins’s heart “stirred for a bird, the achieve of—the mastery of the thing,” here Bridges responds that the bird cannot achieve mastery without the poet’s hand. Line 12 forces us to focus on the word “nót” by using a diacritical mark for stress. This poem’s significance is heightened by both the visible idea of metrical scansion and the fact that this is the only diacritical mark (other than a French accent on the word mêlée) that Bridges leaves in the entire sixty-six sonnet sequence of The Growth of Love. Bridges is calling our attention to his metrical project and demanding that we read the poem on a deeper level. It is not the bird that is of interest here: “ye are nót what ye are, but rather, sum’d in a word / The alphabet of a god’s idea.” The poet, who employs his own alphabet of metrical order, is able to “sum” in a word; it is the poet, and not the bird, who is the master. Bridges employs a more clinical, mathematical “sum” of the metrical parts that make a “whole” of the line and of the poem, even getting rid of the “m” and “e” as if to show that he is adding up only what is necessary, including removing the personal pronoun in all its forms: “sum’d in a word.” This metrical alphabet is neither poor, nor simple, nor foolish, and it is the mastery of it that Bridges wants to transmit to his readers. His metrical performance is mastery; there is no equivocation here as there is in Hopkins’s poem, despite his reticence to fully embrace the experiment in the octave. Here is an early instance in which Bridges asserts his hopes for English meter, daring to display its possibilities in the guise of what will become a long sonnet sequence—“and I / Who master it, I am the only bird.” This poem shows Bridges as a young poet “stirred” by the joy of his own achievement in mastering meter and working along the same lines as his colleague. Though Bridges, in Hopkins’s mind, has not quite mastered his new form, Hopkins still praises the final tercet about mastery, writing that “[t]he Bird-sonnet shews the clearest distortion, though the thought of the last tercet is truly insighted” (71). The bird-as-poetic-expression is recast (or re-sum’d) by both Hopkins and Bridges in the mid-1880s as a metaphor for metrical mastery, but it was Bridges who would carry out his obsession with mastery to such an extreme that it would guarantee his obsolescence as a metrist, poet, and even a historical figure in the twentieth century.

Though Gerard Manley Hopkins and Coventry Patmore are better known for their metrical experiments, Robert Bridges was a crucial interlocutor for both. His book Milton’s Prosody had a greater impact on the metrical landscape than Patmore’s English Metrical Law. But in 1883, Bridges and Hopkins had not yet popularized their ideas about accentual meter. Bridges wrote to Patmore asking him to give an account of his experiments in accentual meter: “[I] hope that you would not be disinclined to give an account of what Hopkins and I call the new prosody.” Patmore was about to revise English Metrical Law for reissue, and both Bridges and Hopkins wanted the revisions to reflect their own experiments. (Patmore’s “new prosody” consisted not only of marking meter as a “series of isochronous intervals” but also moving metrical “law” into the metaphysical and mental realms.) Bridges told Patmore that his verses demonstrated the “new prosody” more popularly or practically than Hopkins’s, though he was careful to note that Hopkins’s verses demonstrated the new prosody more correctly. In the same letter, Bridges demurs, “I shall never write on prosody myself.”²¹ Of course, Bridges had by that time already written on prosody. In the preface to his 1879 edition of Poems, he stressed speech accent as the key to a reading of the poems in sprung rhythm. He also agreed to write an essay, “On the Elements of Milton’s Blank Verse,” for Henry Beeching’s 1887 school edition of Paradise Lost, to be published by the Clarendon Press. In the advertisement at the front of the edition, Beeching writes, “The essay on Milton’s scansion is contributed by a friend. It is hoped that it will succeed in making intelligible the really simple, but (to judge by the notes of commentators) frequently misunderstood rules of Milton’s prosody in Paradise Lost. As a guide to the young student the poetical elisions are marked in the text by an apostrophe.”²² To mark how Bridges imagined Milton pronouncing his text aloud, he, like Hopkins, used an additional mark on the poem so that the student could perform the poem as Bridges imagined it. But it was not only an apostrophe that Bridges provided to aid with reading. In his first attempt at classifying Milton’s system, Bridges gave a list of typical extra-metrical syllables as well as four examples of the way that Milton’s prosody fell under a rule that corrected and standardized the variety of elisions found in Shakespeare. He wrote, “[t]hese, which were common under Shakespeare, Milton in P. L. reduced, and brought under law”(3, emphasis mine). Bridges’s first goal in this early version of the text is to assert that a metrical law can be extrapolated from an intense reading of Milton’s prosody; as a pedagogic practice, therefore, Bridges is showing students that a poet’s use of meter adheres to his or her own laws rather than a larger, inherent design in the language.

By writing that Milton was aware of and practiced his own law of elision in Paradise Lost, Bridges was engaging directly with John Addington Symonds, whose essay “The Blank Verse of Milton” had appeared in The Fortnightly Review²³ as well as in his collection Sketches and Studies of Southern Europe in 1880. Rather than defining blank verse, Symonds’s argument resembles that of Saintsbury, asserting (without much investigation):

[b]lank verse has been the metre of genius, that it is only used successfully by indubitable poets, and that it is no favorite in a mean, contracted, and unimaginative age. The freedom of the Renaissance created it in England. The freedom of our own century has reproduced it. Blank verse is a type and symbol of our national literary spirit—uncontrolled by precedent or rule, inclined to extravagance, yet reaching perfection at intervals by an inner force and vivida vis of native inspiration.²⁴

Symonds reclaimed Milton from Samuel Johnson’s accusation of “haste” and concluded that his erratic substitutions must be read “for the sense” and that it would take “the work of much study and prolonged labor.”²⁵ Bridges’s prolonged labor produced, in this first instance, four detailed laws of elision and two laws of contraction as well as a detailed summary of the stress patterns of Milton’s verse and the possibilities of inverted feet, plus a list of all the possible positions of the caesura. Taken together, all of these details provide the rules under which the poem should be read,²⁶ each verse contracting in specific ways to the particular rules that, taken together, make the verses seem much more syllabic in nature than the free-substitution, foot-based model that Symonds proposes. Like Bridges’s own poems, his evaluation of Milton shows that the genius of the poet proceeded according to a series of laws, of difficulties overcome, and it was this genius that symbolized the beauty of the national meter.

Rather than content himself with this prefatory material, Bridges wanted to circulate these prosodic rules beyond Beeching’s edition; he published a separate edition of the essay in pamphlet form the same year. Bridges did not believe that he had produced the definitive account of Milton’s prosody because the prosody was not the same poem by poem. Therefore, Bridges expanded his study by publishing The Prosody of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes as a supplement in 1889, the year of Hopkins’s death. It is arguable that most of Bridges’s ideas about the prosody of Samson Agonistes would not have been possible without his correspondence with Hopkins, whose own work with the speech rhythms of Samson Agonistes, in particular, was formative in the concept of “sprung rhythm.” Though the supplement appears, at first, merely to give a sense of the further variations that Milton explored in his other poems, it quickly turns polemical, and could read as a defense of Hopkins’s own experimental poems. After quoting a few lines with inverted first feet, he asserts: “Those who think such verses rugged and harsh are unfit to criticize Milton—as the most must always be, because the more elaborate the rhythm, the fewer can appreciate it; and Milton’s rhythms require of the reader more than what commonly passes for a good ear.”²⁷ He continues, vehemently: “Most ‘lovers of poetry’ merely love sing-song. Ritum, ritum, ritum, is rhythm to them, and anything which will not go ritum is harsh; or that and diddledy diddledy are all their notion of rhythm. But that the University of Oxford should print such a vulgar instruction of the youth of the country may well astonish” (8).

The sophisticated knowledge of metrical complexity would render a student more, not less civilized. Here, Bridges distinguishes between the regular “lover of poetry,” conditioned in school to discard all but the most regular rhythms, and sets out to correct these miseducated readers by directing them to the text for which this is a supplement. In so doing, Bridges is redeeming Milton as well as English meter from a simple, conventional understanding of metrical form as associated with rhythmic regularity (a trend that is explored in further detail in the following chapter).

But Bridges was far from finished; in 1893 he published, in limited issue, a revised and expanded version of the text, titled Milton’s Prosody: An examination of the rules of the blank verse in Milton’s later poems, with an Account of the Versification of Samson Agonistes, and general notes, bringing the same book out in regular issue the following year. In this, he expanded his (rather syllabic) view of Paradise Lost and continued to make his case for the stress-prosody of Samson Agonistes. Finally, in 1901, Bridges published a more definitive volume, titled simply Milton’s Prosody, alongside William Johnson Stone’s On the Use of Classical Metres in English Verse. The fact of Bridges’s constant revisions shows that as he was working through Milton’s blank verse he was trying to think through his own ideas of English meter. Although he did not name it as such, the 1901 version of Milton’s Prosody is actually a treatise about all meter in English based on his study of Milton. Or, as one reviewer heralds, “Mr. Bridges’s ambition, however, goes further than the analysis of Miltonic prosody. He designs this essay, with its appendices, to be at least a basis for a scientific scheme of English prosody at large.”²⁸ The 1901 edition of Milton’s Prosody quickly sold out.

But what was Bridges’s scheme? Originally expanding his study of Milton to include a consideration of Milton’s blank verse in Paradise Lost and his very different, more various stress rhythm in Samson Agonistes, it was clear that Bridges felt that there was more than one way to read English meter. In both the 1901 and the 1921 revision, Bridges includes a chapter on the prosody of accentual verse, explaining the differences between syllabic and accentual verse and making a case that there was quite an explicit difference between the two (a distinction he outlines toward the end of his appendix on the “Accentual Hexameter”).²⁹ By the 1921 “definitive edition,” the title became Milton’s Prosody with a Chapter on Accentual Verse.

Bridges’s impulse is to provide rules by which to understand and reeducate readers about the whole of English verse in its bastardized and somewhat backwards evolution. Despite his strenuous detail, he is careful to assert that his “laws” are merely “the tabulation of what my ear finds in English stressed or accentual verse: but they appeal confidently to the reader’s ear for confirmation.”³⁰ He uses the words “heavy,” “light,” and “short” to denote the quantitative value of syllables and outlines six hypotheses toward the rules of stress prosody, but is careful to note in rule four that the ear may be tempted, or tricked, into hearing regular metrical units (that which we have been trained to call iambs and trochees, etc.) rather than the more important irregular speech units of the stress. This outdated method is not, in his mind, “true analysis”:

I am convinced that if any one who hankers after classical analogies will provisionally cast his fancy aside, and examine the real English construction of the verse, he will never, after understanding it, wish to superimpose upon it a foreign and needless explanation. For the stressed rhythm is a sufficient account of itself: its analysis is complete, and if it is not altogether more beautiful, it is more variously beautiful than any other. I would even say that the analogy with Greek or Latin verse is confusing and worse than useless.³¹

Though elsewhere he demonstrates how English verse can be read as analogous to Greek—that is, with similar primal importance of the verbal unit—here he moves toward a definition that repudiates comparisons with what could be seen as foreign, or non-English. This is not to say that Bridges did not believe that experimentation based on classical meter was not possible (indeed, he explored this possibility thoroughly); rather, Bridges is attempting to clarify that stressed rhythm in English makes more sense when we discard the measuring system of Greek and Latin and so, in this way, aligns his views a bit more closely with that of the Anglo-Saxonists Walter Skeat and, prior to him, Edwin Guest. Though Bridges lists disyllabics and trisyllabics that still correspond roughly to iambs, trochees, anapests, and dactyls, it is the patriotic fourth stress unit, the mid-stress trisyllabic, that demonstrates his commitment to inventing a truly English interpretation of stress. He proposes to rename this foot the “Britannic” (the name for the foot demonstrating its pronunciation—unlike any other metrical terminology). By naming the stress unit after the country it represents, Bridges is effectively wrenching the history of the particular system from the sign—a complicated history about which he just has taken great pains to educate us. Furthermore, he goes on to democratize the new meter—“a ‘Britannic’ is the commonest trisyllabic unit of stressed-verse.” Asserting that this newly named mid-stress, trisyllabic foot is the key to understanding the nature of the commonest poetry, he compromises, providing visual signs with which to scan verses that, according to his earlier assertions, should depend solely on the ear.

Granted, the “Britannic,” as it is the most democratic of feet, allows the most freedom and so is not strictly bound to position on the line. He admits the dynamic structure of the verse toward the end of the essay, writing “[t]his is the account of these verses. A consistent prosody is, however, so insignificant a part in what makes good English poetry, that I find that I do not myself care very much whether some good poetry be consistent in its versification or not: indeed I think I have liked some verses better because they do not scan, and thus displease pedants” (99). Indeed, contemporary critic Donald Stanford finds Bridges’s explanation of accentual verse unnecessarily complicated, since “in accentual verse the number of stresses to a line is constant and the stress must coincide with normal speech accent.”³² Bridges’s propensity to justify his hypothesis based on speech is caught again between what he knows his ear is qualified to hear—the normal speech accent of English—and what he knows others, who would be beginners to a standard way of speaking and hearing English, would need to see in order to properly believe what they were expected to hear. Bridges’s lofty ideal would be to banish diacritical marks altogether and trust the true phonetics of English (based on classical understanding and scientific knowledge of English’s evolution), though he cannot begin to convey these revisions for the vocalized, modern form of the language without the appearance of diacritical marks—the visions of ancient signs marking the skin of the versification to measure our distance from the skeleton within.

In a telling account of the history of the volume that appears at the end of the 1921 edition of Milton’s Prosody, Bridges writes, explicitly, that his main goal in writing and revising his account was to correct the tendency to read Milton (and, implicitly, any poet’s meter) improperly. This modest history of the volume rapidly expands into a technique for protecting the whole of English verse and language from sinking more deeply into ignorance, which he finds society reluctant or too frightened to remedy. He writes defensively, insisting that his original intention was to contribute “such an account of the versification as should knock out the prevalent usage of misreading the rhythm; for it was generally thought necessary and correct to mispronounce words so as to make them scan with regular alternate accent.” He continues: “[T]hen, after the book was printed as a separate treatise, young poets started using Miltonic inversions so freely in their blank verse that champions of the prevailing orthodoxy raised an indignant protest in the newspapers, wherein the discussion grew so incredibly hot that a London evening journal advertised ‘prosody’ as an attractive item in its daily papers.”³³ Though he gestures to the debates in which he participated, it is only in his private letters that he accuses metrists like Saintsbury, Skeat, and T. S. Omond of wrongly determining the direction of scholarship about English versification; in his public writing he makes every attempt to be conciliatory and unifying in the presentation of his scholarship. Ever since the public interest in prosody was fueled by the debates, Bridges laments, “this book has been on false footing.” Here, in the 1921 edition, he attempts once again to “set the facts on their proper phonetic basis, but I am well aware that good intentions cannot make up for lack of early training in phonetics; it is a subject that needs a young ear, and my late adventures in the field can only modestly claim to be of use… ” (113–14). The direction, then, of the 1921 edition, is toward criticizing England’s failures to correct the issues he brought up in each edition in the thirty-three years that the book was in print, and to include his revised and mature thinking about the state of pronunciation and the general misuse of the language (a topic that became more and more important to him after the war). Bridges emerges in the early twentieth century as a crusader against “the tyranny of schoolmasters and grammarians,”³⁴ whose attempts to preserve the purity of English result in bemoaning the state of non-phonetic spelling and publishing versions of his poems in his own invented system of phonetic speech.

Most prosodic scholars, however, did not accept Bridges’s prosodic mastery. Joseph Mayor, of Cambridge, attacked both Bridges and Skeat³⁵ in the 1901 (second) edition of Chapters on English Metre, taking issue in particular with Bridges’s attempt to define the elision of extrametrical syllables in Milton’s lines. Mayor’s tone is high-handed: “I feel some doubt as to what would be Mr. Bridges’s explanation of a line such as the following: “That cruel serpent. On me / Exercise most.”³⁶ In an unpublished letter to Mayor as Bridges is revising the 1921 edition, Bridges asks Mayor how he himself would scan the line: “I remember that in controverting my contention that Milton in P.L. consciously excluded what I called ‘extrametrical syllables’ from any [---] of the verse but the final place you quoted against me [a line]: ‘The infernal serpent on me exercise most.’ I am writing to ask if you have any objection to telling me how you accented or shaped the word exercise in that line.”³⁷ Mayor’s reply does not acknowledge Bridges’s question. His form letter response shows that he is entirely unwilling to engage Bridges on the level of pronunciation, which is what Bridges is getting at when he asks him to explain how he would have “accented or shaped” the word.³⁸ What is remarkable about this scholarly disagreement is less that they disagree than the choice of lines over which they argue. Both men are admirers of Milton, and both, as if to suit their own prosodic purposes, quote line 927 from book ten of Paradise Lost as: “That cruel serpent. On me exercise most,” as if Milton’s line is asking for the metrical scholar to exercise his prosodic methodologies on the text of the poem. However, Milton’s line does not read “exercise most.” The line, as if in defiance of all metrical attempts to standardize, reads: “That cruel serpent: on me exercise not” (emphasis mine). Bridges is rebelling against what he feels is an unfairly prescriptive approach to English language teaching; by standardizing phonetic spelling, the rules of English meter would emerge as harmonious with the past and would be truly English in character; the “exercises” of schoolmasters and grammarians, in Bridges’s mind, are to blame for the inefficient state of English literary education. Mayor, on the other hand, represents the prescriptive ends of meter as a grammar—the cruel serpent of grammar exercises “most” in Mayor’s concept of English literary education, whereas Bridges wants to reform it altogether.³⁹

Perhaps fueled by the opposition of scholars like Mayor, in the 1921 edition Bridges does not hesitate to use Milton’s Prosody as a platform for education reform: “I wish that the book may do something to conquer the prejudice which still opposes reform of this fundamental defect in our early education.” He attacks the community to which he appealed repeatedly for validation, implicitly including, among others, his dear friend Henry Bradley, editor of the New English Dictionary (later the OED) and frequent correspondent:

[T]here are very few of my contemporaries who will listen to common sense in this matter, or allow the clear light of scientific method to dispel the mystifications which prevent our children from understanding the elements of speech. And the further they proceed in the higher education the more hopelessly are they involved and confirmed in their ignorance: the barbarous distortion of Latin in our great schools is strenuously upheld as a reasonable propriety which it is almost a national offence to discredit.⁴⁰

Bridges recognizes British society’s attachment to the classical languages and all that they signify, but like other reformers eager to demystify the abstractions of linguistic signs, Bridges is attempting to be more nationalistic than the nationalists. By proposing a system that reverts to a conception of prosody that existed before the earliest pollution, he wants English ears to be able to hear again and hear clearly. We may read many of his proposed revisions as logical, democratic, and toward the promotion of the true greatness of English.

To do this, he has to devalue the sanctity of the mispronounced verbal sign, relying on formal verbal unity as opposed to formal literary structure—he abhors the “pedantry of scansion” and believes that true English speech, if pronounced properly, will naturally vocalize English verse as it should be heard. He asserts that the voice tone must translate words to the “plane of ideas and emotions” in Greek as in English. “In versification,” he writes, “we know that the manner to which every one is accustomed, even though it be pedantry, has a far greater propriety to our ears than that which we should rightly prefer if we were not prejudiced by custom—the ridiculous distortion of sense and speech-rhythm in the chanting of the Psalms by the trained choirs of our Cathedrals is a good example” (13). And Bridges meticulously shows where the earliest corruption occurred: in the Latin language, when it wrongly discarded accent and instead attempted to imitate Greek verse form based on quantity. This mistranslation was then passed down through Chaucer to corrupt the English ears that Saintsbury will assert are perfect and privileged. Bridges is extremely careful, throughout Milton’s Prosody, to show how he arrived at his conclusions by a systematic evaluation of Milton’s verses; in order to prove the possible positions and numbers of accents and possible syllabic values, he cites particular lines throughout Paradise Lost. Despite this critical attention to prosodic detail, he asserts that the “rules” he is explaining are essentially “permissive, [Milton] indicates no rule for their use; their application is arbitrary.… Milton came to scan his verses in one way, and to read them in another” (34–35). Prosody, in this way, is proved to be an interpretive exercise for both poet and reader; rather than a guide as to how to vocally emphasize accents in a line, the “rhythm overrides the prosody that creates it. The prosody is only the means for the great rhythmical effects, and is not exposed but rather disguised in the reading” (36). By teaching the reader the system in which to scan the poem’s prosody, the text encourages the reader to appreciate the poem’s rhythmic effects at a higher level. Put most simply, by providing even provisional prosodic rules against which the rhythm rebels, Bridges wants the reader to begin to hear (rather than rely on wrenched pronunciation based on visible metrical signs) the variety within the verse—to Bridges’s ear, the beauty of verse in its variety.

Though the few scholars who notice the historical divisions in the study of English prosody often cast the debate in terms of “accent” versus “quantity,” or “stress” versus “time,” the very definitions of “accent,” “quantity,” “stress,” and “time” in English verse were dynamic, malleable, and shifted in specificity and abstraction depending on the intended audience, which I hope I have by now shown. Opposite of Bridges’s willingness to explore multiple foundations and definitions of meter, Saintsbury devoted an enormous amount of energy to fixing the terms for poetic form. He felt strongly that the history of English poetry would clearly prove his opinions about English prosody, but he was also invested in a reading practice that he seemed to take for granted as that shared by all Englishmen. A teacher of Greek and Latin and even Hebrew at a young age, Saintsbury, like most young men of his generation, learned in just three or four years of school, “the first three books of the Aeneid, the Odes of Horace, some Homer, and most of the iambic part, with some of the choruses, of two or three Greek plays,” which he described as “large patterns and examples of the most perfect literary form that the world has produced.”⁴¹ This is a typical assessment from a student educated at King’s College School in London and Merton College in Oxford, where there was not yet regular instruction in English literature when Saintsbury finished his studies in 1868. Yet Saintsbury asserts that he formed his ideas about English prosody solely by reading English poetry.⁴² And as this proclaimed prosodic autodidact’s 1878 review of Coventry Patmore’s English Metrical Law⁴³ reveals, even at the young age of thirty-three, Saintsbury (like Patmore, Bridges, and Hopkins) was not only fully aware of the complicated nineteenth-century prosodic debates, but he had already formed strong opinions about them. In this 1878 review, Saintsbury displays what would become his characteristic style of dismissing prosodic systems that did not satisfy his own nascent ideas of what an English foot should be and do:

Mr. Patmore does not seem to have made quite as valuable a contribution to the literature of the subject as he might have made; the fatal old quarrel between accent and quantity has drawn him to take part in it with the usual result. The truth seems to be that English verse is to be scanned both by quantity and accent, and that no verse is really good which does not answer to this double test. Those who rely only upon accent give us slipshod doggerel; those who rely only upon quantity give us variations on the original “Tityus happily thou,” and so on.⁴⁴

He provides no information to back up his claim that the “truth seems to be” that English meter is scanned by both accent and quantity. His devotion to this singular understanding of meter is reinforced when, less than ten years later, he asserts his belief in an English foot measurable by both accent and quantity and based explicitly on classical meters, in his History of Elizabethan Literature (1887): “I must entirely differ with those persons who have sought to create an independent prosody for English verse under the head of ‘beats’ or ‘accents’ or something of that sort.”⁴⁵ For Saintsbury, the question of English independence was a crucial issue; he felt that verse must not rely solely on accent without some form of quantity or else it loses its link to the classical languages. This assertion comes as a result of Skeat’s reissue of Guest’s imposing and “epoch-making” History of English Rhythms (1882) a mere five years earlier. Guest believed accent to be “the sole principle”⁴⁶ that regulates English rhythm and that English has no metrical quantity.⁴⁷ Guest’s notion of an English prosody independent of the classics epitomized one of the schisms between prosodic perspectives at the time. The competing histories of prosody in the late nineteenth century were also competing histories of Englishness: were the nation’s literary and national origins in the great Shakespeare and Milton, or were they in the Anglo-Saxon and Old-English tradition? One camp valued the continuous line of poetic thought from Shakespeare to Swinburne, and the other prioritized preserving the narrative of steady beating Anglo-Saxon rhythms against the foreignness of classical verse forms. The latter explained the English literary tradition as influenced by a native beat that rebelled against and repelled various foreign yokes (the Guest/Skeat model), whereas the former conceived of it as a stream that had various influences that were absorbed, colonized, and interpolated as part of an evolution (the Saintsbury model, though a bit less neatly). Saintsbury’s mission was to guarantee that Guest’s theories would not prove to be any more influential.⁴⁸ He would accomplish this not only by undermining Guest’s History and arguing vehemently against the accentual system, but by replacing Guest’s looming two-volume project with three volumes of his own.

In prosodic manuals, size does matter. In Saintsbury’s next step toward foot domination, he published A Short History of English Literature (1898). Guest’s History was 738 pages; Saintsbury’s “short” history was 818 pages (the later, three-volume History of English Versification ran to a staggering 1,577 pages). In the Short History, Saintsbury makes clear his view that, in English prosody’s history, just as in the history of the English language and people, there was a distinct break with Anglo-Saxon influences; therefore, there was also a break with Guest’s solely accentual basis for English meter. In his introductory section, “The Making of English Literature,” he claims that “the true and universal prosody of English instead of the cramped and parochial rhythm of Anglo-Saxon”⁴⁹ came about from the influence of Latin. He titles this section “the transition,”⁵⁰ and it is, in many ways, a blueprint for the section he titles “The Mothers” in his larger History of English Prosody. (The Short History was in its eighth edition by 1913.) Between 1898 and 1905, Saintsbury published revised editions of A History of Nineteenth-Century Literature (1900 and 1901) and A History of English Criticism (1900, 1901, 1902). Both of these divulged and elaborated on his intent to disseminate his faith in the English foot to the “general brain”; that is, how he could extend his conception of English meter to the masses.

Saintsbury’s essay, titled simply “English Versification,” is quite possibly the most succinct summary of his views on the matter. Yet it was not published as part of his three-volume History, nor did it appear as an English Association pamphlet. Rather, this essay was the introduction to a handbook for poets by Andrew Loring, titled The Rhymer’s Lexicon (1905). “English Versification” was at once an advertisement for Saintsbury’s forthcoming three volumes as well as a clear distillation of them. Saintsbury here defines the history of English Versification not as “a struggle between native and foreign rhythm, but of the native material of language adapting itself to the pressure of the foreign moulds, and modifying those moulds themselves by the spring and ‘thrust’ of its natural qualities.”⁵¹ The result, he writes, “is one of the most interesting things in literature.… By looking both ways—from earliest to latest and from latest to earliest—we can distinguish a new form of verse, characteristically English in its blended originality, which takes the general rhythmical form of Low Latin and French, but which adapts them to, or adapts to them, the primaeval English tendency to syllabic equivalence.”⁵²

The “blended originality” of English verse form is a point of pride in his longer History; by 1905, Saintsbury was becoming the representative for standard English meter based on a subtle blending of classical (foreign, quantitative) and Anglo-Saxon (native, accentual) meter. Though his own understanding of these meters seemed fluid, malleable and, indeed, unstable, the more destabilized and conceptual his opinion seemed the more ardent he became in his assertion of their fundamental Englishness. The result of this careful blending, he felt, was a dependable and timeless conception of English meter and a conception of Englishness as distinct from the classics: a culmination rather than a deviation. As a founding member of the English Association and a professor at the University of Edinburgh, Saintsbury balanced more than just Anglo-Saxon accents and classical quantities; he was defending a characteristic Englishness that could value the classical languages as a necessary part of English literature at a time when they were under siege. There had been a loud and angry reaction against the reinstatement of compulsory Latin after the 1902 Education Act,⁵³ and Saintsbury was performing the role of the English literary historian while at the same time trying to preserve the connection between English literature and its classical pasts. Skeat, on the one hand, was uninterested in classical verse terms altogether and was supplanting the classics in the academy with the rise of his own discipline, Anglo-Saxon, arguing that this should be the basis and history of English literature rather than the classical languages. Robert Bridges, on the other hand, saw both sides of this equation, wanting students to see the benefit of the Anglo-Saxon literary past while, at the same time, understanding the ways that classical verse forms could be useful as one way, among many, to expand the possibilities for English prosody. That is, for Bridges, the purity, diversity, and freedom of English meter meant understanding each distinct possibility (the accentual, the syllabic, etc.) as a separate system that required its own kind of training and its own possibility for mastery. His characterizations of each system contained within them some hope for a broad-reaching and inclusive future for English meter and the nation. Saintsbury, ambitious though he was, was defensive about the rise of Anglo-Saxon as part of English literary study and wanted desperately to preserve not only the classics as a discipline but his understanding of the classical English gentleman, with an education that set him apart from others. Though Saintsbury may not have wanted to acknowledge it, his work reveals that in order to understand English meter one had to be educated in a certain way.

The quick rise of English education—and the uncertainty, after the failures of the Boer War, whether the education system was doing its proper job in creating a strong, competitive, and patriotic class of potential soldiers⁵⁴—accelerated the pace and passion of prosodic debate outside the classroom and increased the circulation of and demand for texts that would teach English poetry and meter along purely national lines. Pamphlets and tracts from the English Association, established in part by Henry Newbolt in 1906, and the Society for Pure English, established in part by Bridges in 1913, worried over the fate of English pronunciation, spelling, and reading practices—issues that they believed might help solve the prolific and zealous debates over defining English meter. Like the concurrent experiments of phoneticians Henry Sweet and Alexander Ellis, popularized by George Bernard Shaw in Pygmalion, pronunciation reforms to standardize English might erase some distinctions between the working- and upper classes.⁵⁵ Though this local application of education reform had broader social reform as its aim, Saintsbury’s prosodic writing expressed an increasing anxiety that both pronunciation reform and social reform might too broadly democratize the field of English literary study. If English meter was truly accessible to all, then how might we measure the poets against the mere versifiers?

Increasingly, the foreign names for classical feet were called into question and students were taught to feel English poetry according to “natural” accents (traced to an Anglo-Saxon past) divorced from the valueless and hegemonic classical system of iambs and trochees. American prosodist C. E. Andrews called this conflict in 1918, “prosodic wars.”⁵⁶ It enlisted, as I have described, those committed to moving the concept of English meter away from its classical origins, and even away from the popular concept of feet, into a more capacious metrical system. Sometimes this system was syllabic, sometimes accentual, and it could reflect varieties of dialects and even welcome other languages. These hopes for English meter were altogether not new but their nationalistic and defensive stance in the Edwardian era had been increasing steadily with each expansion of the education system; every new expansion seemed accompanied by new anxieties about what English literary education meant for national culture. Educators and poets alike had high expectations for Saintsbury’s three-volume A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day (1906–10), in which the issue, for Saintsbury, was no longer explicitly the contest between Anglo-Saxon or classical measures but rather how the blend of these two metrical heritages could constitute a characteristic English meter and, more importantly, could most accurately measure the ideal English character. Saintsbury’s dependence upon an essential Englishness, which could be deduced from masterful poetics and instilled in the masses through prosodic acuity, would only deepen his drive toward commandeering the culture’s understanding of the “foot.”

Saintsbury wanted it both ways. On the one hand, he wanted to popularize the foot-based system as natural for those with an English ear, and on the other hand wanted all Englishmen to possess an ear precisely like his own, despite his bitter awareness that they did not. In his introduction to Loring’s 1905 The Rhymer’s Lexicon, Saintsbury lays out his metrical principles:

“lines”… possess a definite rhythm based on what is called double and triple time; that these integers (the lines) are made up of corresponding or proportionate fractions to which it has been usual to give the name of “feet,” though some object; that they are as a rule tipped with rhyme, whether in simple sequences or pairs or in more complicated sets called stanzas. It is upon the nature and constitution of these fractions that the hottest and most irreconcilable difference prevails among prosodists. Some prefer to regard them merely from the point of view of the accented syllables which they contain, while others consider them as made up of “long” and “short” syllables precisely as classical feet are, though not combined on quite the same systems; and yet others hold different views.⁵⁷

Saintsbury insists on the portability of the “foot” across time. And yet, for those without a classical education, these feet may still seem foreign. Saintsbury finds a way around this dilemma by promoting a kind of national metrical intuition over formal training: the English ear. He writes, “the ear recognizes for itself, or is made to recognize by the sleight-of-hand of the poet, one broad distinction of value between syllables—the distinction which is denoted, in classical prosody, by the terms ‘long’ and ‘short.’” But Saintsbury demands that issues such as time in utterance, sharper or graver tone, lighter or heavier weight, louder or softer sound, and thinner and denser substance do not matter in terms of the distinction between English and classical prosody. Saintsbury instead simply suggests that “everybody (if he would only admit it) recognizes the fact of the broad difference”(xvi). We hear them, he says, but we might not admit that we do. Despite the metaphors of stepping-stones, fence posts, and walking to which the word “foot” lends itself, Saintsbury detracts attention from his obvious and innocent allusion to earlier usages of the term: “call them feet, spaces, isochronous intervals, or abracadabras, every English verse can be divided up… into so many groups of ‘long’ and ‘short’ syllables which have metrical correspondence with each other in the line and in other lines… call the name iamb or abracadabra, trochee or tomfool, the thing is there from the Brut to the Barrack-Room Ballads” (xix). From the earliest rhymed history of England to patriotic tales of soldiers, Saintsbury asserts that the history of meter and of England is unified, indivisibly, by these groups of syllables that preexist and predate even our ability to name them—name them whatever you like, but Saintsbury likes to call them feet. The English ear, as he construes it, is particularly adapted to detect and judge them.

But even if Saintsbury gives plenty of examples of the best poetry in English with his descriptions and praise, the book itself cannot provide the “ear training” of the native Englishman who is classically trained, though Saintsbury does not say this directly. That is, implicit everywhere in the three volumes is the fact that the classical methods through which Saintsbury was trained prepared him for what he then translates into an innate sense of rhythmic sound that haunted his thinking about rhythm and meter. This “innate sense” also played extremely well on the way that the national education system was teaching English poetry. For Saintsbury, an “English ear” that could naturally hear metrical feet based loosely on a classical measure of scansion was the true English ear—the true, classically trained, public school educated, elite English ear. History, as far as metrical training was concerned, was transformed into nature, but only for those with access to a classical education. Saintsbury argues, in a direct attack on Guest and Skeat, that although there is a natural English ability to both see and hear the beauty of English verses, some artificial training is beneficial:

I hope it is not impertinent or pedantic once more to recommend strongly this joint eye- and-ear reading. It does not at all interfere with the understanding of the sense or enjoyment of the poetry, and it puts the mind in a condition to understand the virtue and the meaning of the prosody as nothing else can. One of the innumerable privileges of those who have received the older classical education is that they have been taught (in at least some cases) to read scanningly.⁵⁸

The eye and an ear are a “combined instrument,” “properly tuned,” that will reveal English meter to be “a real and living rhythmical organism” (184). But if it is between a theory of scansion, which is intended for the eye, and pronunciation, intended for the ear, the remaining two volumes lean toward the ear. The eye, directed by signs that may be visible to all and therefore less interpretive, less dependent on an elite education, might be frighteningly democratic.

Saintsbury did not invent the concept of an “English ear” (it was already evident in schoolbooks and elocution manuals); nor did this concept resemble the “natural” pronunciation that Murray may have intended in the Grammars that I discussed in chapter 1. For Saintsbury, the “English ear” meant a certain kind of pronunciation coupled with refined hearing. Prins notices how Saintsbury’s discussion of Tennyson’s “Hollyhock Song” in volume three of his History of English Prosody is especially striking for the way it emphasizes a particularly English reader: “One reads it,” Saintsbury writes, “wondering how any human ear could be ‘tortured’ by it, but wondering still more how any Englishear could be in the least puzzled by its metre.”⁵⁹ Above mere human understanding, the English ear is undeniably privileged. In this statement, Saints-bury claims that the true English ear is able to detect true English meter. He exclaims: “Our business is with English; and I repeat that, in English, there are practically no metrical fictions, and that metre follows, though it may sometimes slightly force, pronunciation.” Though at times he focuses on the regular combination and alternation of metrical feet in various forms, the book also makes a case for iambic meter and, specifically, for ballad meter, as particularly English. The ballad meter is “very much ours”; “the ballad quatrain, or common measure… perhaps the most definitely English—blood and bone, flesh and marrow—of all English metres. It comes the most naturally of all to an English tongue and an English ear.”⁶⁰ Joining the forms of English verse to the forms of English bodies, Saintsbury emphasizes the instinct, the internal feeling that English speakers and hearers should have for prosodic forms. Not only do these forms prove that you are an Englishman, they bind you to other Englishmen, with whom you also share “blood,” “bone,” “flesh,” “marrow,” “tongue,” and “ear.” This rhetoric sounds particularly Anglo-Saxon, and it is the same one called upon on the other side of the Atlantic by prosodists such as Sidney Lanier and Frances Gummere, but here the blood and bone of the collective Anglo-Saxon body is yoked, idealistically, to a classically educated, trained, and civilized English ear.

Not only must one’s ear be tuned, like Saintsbury’s own, to hear, for example, blended classical feet in English verse, but one must also (it is his hope) understand and absorb the characteristics that these blended, natural feet create. Saintsbury’s narrative of the evolution of English feet is imbued with the same militaristic swagger as the patriotic poems that were being taught in state-funded schools: English feet evolved into their “orderly and soldierly fashion” over time, grouped into syllables and then into lines like so many regiments. Indeed, English metrical feet form “vast armies” that English citizens, future armies, are conditioned to hear “naturally.” It is a matter of national pride that English readers should, can, and do cultivate their faculties in order to correctly appreciate poetry.

But if Saintsbury’s idealized and “natural” English ear is, in fact, a classically trained organ, how does he promote the English foot soldier among the general reading public, the majority of whom did not have access to (much less sustained training in) classical languages and literatures? Rather than define explicitly what he means by “feet,” Saintsbury again and again insists on an innate sense of rhythm. What he does give us, in 1906, is a justification, along militaristic lines, of the ascendancy of his favorite metrical foot, the iamb: “To get the vast armies, the innumerable multitudes of [iambic verse] that exist[s] in English, into trochaic form, or in most cases even into a suggestion of trochaic rhythm, you have to play the most gratuitous, unliterary, and unnatural tricks upon them, and you often produce positively ludicrous or nauseous results.”⁶¹

Saintsbury, as one might expect, prefers iambic to trochaic rhythm, but values the trochee highly as the necessary variant for the iamb. However, his ability to diagnose English verse as iambic rather than trochaic is dependent only on his ability to hear meter; he states simply and vexingly, “my ear informs me.” In this early appendix to the first volume he also makes his first declaration of the self-evident truths of English feet. The iamb is the “ruling constituent,” the anapest “omnipresent.” Of the dactyl he has “no doubt… at all,” despite its tendency to “tip up” into an anapest; Why does it do this? He writes, “I do not know why; and though it would not cost me five minutes to turn the statement of the fact into a jargonish explanation thereof on principles very popular to-day, I decline to do anything of the kind. The English language is made so and I accept the fact” (402–3), and thus he urges us to accept the fact as well. Though part of Saintsbury’s inherent charm is his confidence that we will take his word for it, his lack of technical guidance leaves us with the one thing he has been convincing us we have—our ear. Our understanding of English prosody is at once intensely individual, therefore, but also, necessarily collective. Rather than being taught what the iamb is (or was) and how to mark it and memorize it, as a student in a classical classroom would have been, Saintsbury infuses his concept of English meter with an Edwardian article of faith in the steadfast and sturdy nature of the language, of an England in which the iamb is and always has been the ruling constituent. Just like the schoolchild learning about English poetry through narratives of military glory, like the countless histories of England that justified and extolled imperial expansion, Saintsbury’s English meter spoke to and fostered what he imagined was a specifically national character.

Though reviewers of A History of English Prosody did not take Saintsbury’s word for it, we, as English speakers, largely have. After being accused of not defining the “the English foot,” he added an appendix to the third volume, in 1910, titled coyly, “What Is a Foot?” Here he summarizes his position along military lines once again: “[F]rom almost the first ‘syllable of recorded time,’ when English became fully English, its verse arranges itself—haltingly at first, then in a more and more orderly and soldierly fashion—in certain equivalent groups of syllables themselves, which, in turn, are grouped further into lines.”⁶² This definition does not appear in the main text, however; Saintsbury hides it in an appendix, one of the many additions he includes in the 1910 volume three. Again, “it is the result to the ear which decides”⁶³ whether it hears something long, or short, or loud, or soft, or accented by degrees. But Saintsbury is just as reticent, four years after the start of his project, to provide an answer or definition. He admits, “sometimes you may be unable to go positively right, because there are two or more available interpretations of the riddle” (522). We might think, then, that feet, for Saintsbury, are abstract equivalent spaces, like Coventry Patmore’s isochronous intervals, or T. S. Omond’s “time-spaces.”⁶⁴ But this is not the case. Despite the interpretive freedom he grants, for Saintsbury, English feet are no abstraction, even though they are sometimes equivalent and interchangeable. He writes, “I take them as something real.” They have personalities; the foot “is a member of a line-body,” “a prosodic entity”:

But… there abide these three—iamb, trochee, and anapaest—in the English aristocracy of poetry. The iamb is with us the staple of poetic life: it will do any work, take on any colour, prove itself at need the equal of the other two, which it often summons to reinforce it. The trochee is the passion of life; not easily adaptable by itself, except for special moments, comic or tragic, frivolous or plaintive, as it chooses, but seasoning and inspiriting the iamb constantly and yet strangely. And the anapaest is the glory of life, though its uses differ in glory.⁶⁵

Here, Saintsbury uses patriotic and Biblical rhetoric and admits what he has been subtly insisting all along, or subtly hoping to convince us that we already knew: English meter is (just like Latin or Greek) something “aristocratic,” and it also requires faith. (The allusion to St. Paul particularly aligns the iamb with “faith.”)⁶⁶ Not only are these three feet singled out as equivalent to the glories of classical meter, but they are imbued with the nationalistic characteristics of a military regiment: they will do their duty, they will support one another, they will do any work. His particularly Edwardian emphasis on the Englishness of English meter—to the level of the dutiful iamb—plays into the expectations of poetry’s nationally educated audience in the years leading up to the First World War. By refusing to engage with the complexity of English meter, we can read Saintsbury’s History as an attempt at stabilization for the healthy, collective, patriotic view of English meter and, by extension, English poetry’s role as a stabilizing, patriotic force in national culture. Saintsbury’s equivocation and failure in the History, however, reveals deeper insecurity that all prosodic investigations and perhaps even all national identifications, no matter how ardently we assert that they are “natural,” are matters of sheer and stubborn faith—unstable, historically contingent categories that may be artificial constructions both then and now.

So far we’ve seen how Bridges and Saintsbury can be used to represent two opposing camps in the “Prosody Wars.” Saintsbury sought a purely “English” metrical scheme that depended upon a perpetuation of the class differences in education, whereas Bridges sought a naturalization of English meter through universal accessibility. Given the climate of the Victorian education system, it is not surprising that Saintsbury’s behemoth crusade against a conception of meter flexible enough to incorporate the dynamics of time and the differences of class and nationality took precedence. The Victorian bias—that a mind untrained in classics was somehow unprepared for the larger world—persisted long into the Edwardian and Georgian periods and particularly during the First World War.⁶⁷ Despite the growing popularity of English as an efficient means to educate the masses and even, toward the turn of the century, the creation of English departments in the major universities, the association between the elite public schools and classical education remained secure, creating a network of gentlemen whose academic knowledge was specific to the insulated world of their particular alma mater.

The characteristics of a classical education went beyond the mere acquisition of Latin and Greek; it included a nostalgia for past glory directly tied to England’s potential for greatness, a guarantee of postgraduate success and a mark of refined taste, rigorous study based on approved pedagogical methods meant to discipline the character of young men, a stubborn and determined ignorance of English literature (which was not yet a course of study at Oxford when Bridges and Saintsbury were students there),⁶⁸ and specialized academic knowledge down to the particular pronunciation of Latin at each school. And yet, during Bridges’s and Saintsbury’s lifetimes, the characteristics of classical learning would be adopted, altered, defended, and questioned by the progress of English literature and language as an alternative seat of humanist learning. Their ideas about English prosody and how it should be taught must be understood, in part, as a consequence of the ways that their generation was marked by the loss of, and anticipatory nostalgia for, the valuable English characteristics that were seen as a unique result of a classical education.

And yet, despite the ways Bridges was clearly marked by his classical education, he did not believe in classical pedagogy, nor did he think that Greek should be compulsory by any means. In 1919, Bridges summarized his position in a humorous poem: “For teachers know examination / To be the crown of education: / Since minds like plants cannot be trusted / To keep their rootlets well adjusted, / They who would rear them must examine’em / To gauge th’effect of what they cram in ’em.”⁶⁹ Methods of classical education shifted away from the turn-of-the-eighteenth-century model: boys between the ages of five and eleven were drilled in Latin and Greek so that they could enter the public schools, commune with the greats, and become model citizens. Latin was taught first, then Greek through the Latin. Efficiency prevented any detailed understanding of the particulars of vocalized Greek and Latin (the teacher’s “pronunciation” was often good enough for the pupils), and toward the late nineteenth century even the Greek and Latin grammars were composed in English rather than Latin, reflecting the premium placed on pedagogical efficiency. The pedagogical methods of classical education at the turn of the nineteenth century were admired and abhorred, but despite all external pressures, promoters and detractors alike could not escape the entrenched association between classical education and rules, measure, and order.

In this context, Bridges, who attended Eton in the late 1850s and early 1860s, was seen as “one of the finest products that the social and educational caste system of England could produce.”⁷⁰ Bridges and Saintsbury shared a typical classical education (and a birthday).⁷¹ The pedagogic model for teaching Latin and Greek—through memorization, translation, and composition—is one obvious cause of the brewing disdain for classical pedagogy at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century; outdated methodologies especially marginalized the teaching of Greek.⁷² James Brinsley-Richards, a colleague of Bridges at Eton who seems only to be known for his popular memoir, Seven Years at Eton (1857–64) confessed, “in truth we learned very little, beyond maundering by rote Latin rules as many as were wanted for the day’s lessons; and from day to day we forgot what we had committed to our tongues’ tips the day before.”⁷³ The students learned physically “by rote,” yet did not commit the rules to memory; the vocalized discipline of language intending to shape the young pupil’s mind through its rigid form, according to this memoir, does not even reach the student’s mind. Indeed, the rules were so transient in Brinsley-Richards’s mind that they came alive only on the “tongue-tips” of the students; the dead languages resuscitated only when spoken, not awakened by any nostalgic memory of comprehension or humanistic transformation. Classical pedagogy turned classical verse forms into abstractions that symbolized more than they actually meant.

Bridges became poet laureate in 1913 and the first poem that he published, “Flycatchers,” was significant both because within it he states his disdain for the pedagogical methods of the classical education he received but also because in publishing the poem in Harold Monro’s Poetry and Drama he aligns himself with a younger generation whose civilizing literature was English and who did not necessarily believe in the necessity of the classical traditions.⁷⁴ In “Flycatchers,” Bridges recalls “a time sixty summers ago / When, a young chubby chap, I sat just so / With others on a school-form rank’d in a row, / Not less eager and hungry than you.”⁷⁵ The pupils, “ranked” by their progress in class and ordered in a row, are figured as birds: “sweet pretty fledglings, perched on the rail arow / expectantly happy” (l. 1) and waiting for the professor to endow them with knowledge. But the professor is no mystical scholar, he is here an “authoritative old wise-acre” who “stood over us and from a desk fed us with flies” (l. 10):

Dead flies— such as litter the library south-window,
That buzzed at the panes until they fell stiff-baked on the sill,
Or are roll’d up asleep i’the blinds at sunrise,
Or wafer’d flat in a shrunken folio.
A dry biped he was, nurtured likewise 15
On skins and skeletons, stale from top to toe
With all manner of rubbish and all manner of lies.

Both a critique of “dry as dust pedantry” and an “experimental poem” in what he calls “free rhythm,”⁷⁶ the poem exploits the pervading early twentieth-century anticlassical sentiment in subject matter, turning Greek and Latin words into corpses exhumed for each young generation of hopeful birds. The useless continuity of the system, in which the professors teach what they were taught to keep the system alive, is condemned as “rubbish and lies,” the dead letters literally “litter,” and the classical “fly leaves” are transformed into dead flies. The professor is reduced to his scientific and metrical classification of “a dry biped,” (as in “two feet”) inhumanly droning grammatical shapes, skins, and skeletons into the pupils.

Though the meter of the poem is, in 1913, still undeveloped, it previews Bridges’s later experiments in neo-Miltonic syllabics, the lines not adhering to a strict syllabic count as we understand it today, but instead observing the system of English quantity that Bridges had carefully worked out in his study of Milton’s prosody. The formal tension in this poem is not necessarily between tradition and experiment; both accentual and syllabic patterns are irregular, which brings the all too regular rhyme to the forefront (an effect that falls out of Bridges’s later verses entirely). As if to mimic the droning repetition of a typical lesson, Bridges ends the majority of his lines with rhymes on the word “row,” a mockery of the kind of order expected in the classroom: arow, below, ago, so, row, trow, aglow, window, folio, toe. The archaic “trow” appears as a rhythmic jolt, to call attention to the artificiality of the scheme and the poet casting for a word to fit into his composition. The repeated “oh” sounds add a sickening echo of the possibility of punishment, as in line 13, “buzzed at the panes until they fell stiff-baked on the sill” (read as “pains”) echoes both physical consequence and a futile longing for escape. The only other repeated rhyme in the poem is “flies,” appearing always with the image of being fed, in lines 4, 11, and 18. We hear “lies” in “flies,” of course, lies that have been repeated from generation to generation. No other sound is heard, here, other than the buzzing to escape; the poem confirms the assertions that the imposition of classical grammatical forms was something forced in by the mouth. Even the “eye” sound of “lies/flies” is stifled, “blind[s] at sunrise,” in the dark turn at the end. The stiff figure of the professor is ironically “nurtured likewise”—withered, unwise, dry with the old lies.

Though Bridges had a deep and abiding interest in the classics, classical meters, and foreign verse forms in general, he saw in Milton’s prosody a way that English verse might break free from its artificial reliance on classical scansion. Along with Hopkins, Bridges was avidly engaged in thinking through the problems that a purely “English” system of scansion presented. Why do we scan based on the classical model, a model that must be inaccurate, since we have no conception of how a dead language sounds? Milton’s Prosody became a salvo for English poetry’s misunderstanding of classical meter and an attempt to put forth new ideas for English prosody on a broad scale. Saintsbury, on the other hand, preferred to replace the abstraction of classical meter with the abstraction of English meter, taking for granted that enough of England would be properly trained to hear with the kind of classical ear he imagined. Bridges’s proposals, in a series of appendices added to and revised for each edition of the book, attempt to clarify and purify what he saw as the gross miseducation of the English ear in accepting the inaccurate and abstract system based on the classical model and promoted by Saintsbury. In sum, Bridges believed that a better understanding of meter might mediate between the classical languages and English. In his introduction to the 1901 edition, he writes, “[i]f we consider how familiar classical poetry is to English poets and how much it influences their practice, this definition of the English syllables [along the lines Stone proposes] is a necessary study for those who, through habits of English pronunciation, consciously or unconsciously misread classical verse.”⁷⁷ The publication and subsequent popularity of these pamphlets should be read as an anticipatory protest against the 1902 Education Act, in which compulsory Latin and Greek, modeled on what Stone and Bridges both agreed was a false understanding of classical prosody, was again enforced by the state. Bridges complained to Henry Bradley, editor of the OED, in 1904: “I was disappointed in the result of voting on the compulsory Greek. We shall have our way in all these matters in a few years, if we stick to it. It vexes me that they are bothering my boy with Greek, he has only just got over his Latin troubles.… His time is being wasted—and most boys are in the same condition.”⁷⁸ In this 1904 letter, we see that Bridges still has some faith that reform is possible, though he has little faith that schoolmasters will be able to give his son an accurate understanding of Latin and Greek. But reform was not likely; between 1904 and the First World War, schools promoted an increasingly abstract model for English meter and the modernist avant-garde arose to protest the metronome of similar-sounding metrical poetry that they wrongly associated with Victorian poetics. The potential for dynamism, for reformed phonetic spelling and standardized pronunciation, and for a truly technical and linguistic understanding of the various possibilities for English prosody, lost out to the pedagogic and patriotic necessities of the Edwardian period. Bridges’s interests became the purview of the scientific study of prosody that evolved away from English departments and into linguistics departments in the 1920s. Saintsbury’s model of an abstract, interpretive, and essentially nationalistic model is that which we have inherited as our traditional prosody in English departments to this day.

And yet Saintsbury’s particularly Edwardian emphasis on the Englishness of English meter—to the level of the dutiful iamb—plays into the expectations of poetry’s nationally educated audience in the years leading up to the First World War. By refusing to engage with the complexity of English meter, we can read Saintsbury’s History as stabilizing for the healthy, collective, patriotic view of English meter and poetry’s role in national culture. Saintsbury popularized the theory that meter is interpretive, subjective. The laws of verse, variously argued and defended in the Victorian period as universal, began to emerge in the Edwardian period as a manifestation of the individuality so valued by the culture of the twentieth century. Despite the complexities and oversimplifications of the prosody wars, the phenomenon of actual war artificially consolidated the pedagogical model for meter; the need for order and discipline in education outweighed that of defining a metrical category as complex as the evolving Edwardian culture it represented. Rather than agree with his reviewers that he could have done more to settle the matter, we might read Saintsbury’s reticence to provide a technical answer to the problem of prosody as a symptom of a deeper anxiety at the beginning of the twentieth century—that all prosodic investigations, and perhaps even all national identifications, were matters of sheer and stubborn faith.