The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860–1930
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Failure of Meter
Modern Instability
Metrical Communities
Meter as Culture
A Note on Historical Prosody
Chapter 1: The History of Meter
A Metrical History of England
A Grammatical History of England
Grammatical Instability
Metrical Instability
Chapter 2: The Stigma of Meter
Metrical Irrelevance
The British Empire of Letters
Marking Instresss
Acute Stress in “The Wreck of the Deutschland”
Mistrusting the Ear
Chapter 3: The Institution of Meter
Metrical Mastery
Inventing the Britannic
Dynamic Reading
Mastery for the Masses
The English Ear
A Prosodic Entity
Chapter 4: 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
Chapter 5: The Trauma of Meter
Wartime, Poetics
Sad Death for a Poet!
Therapeutic Measures
Bent-Double
The Kindred Points of Heaven and Home
Chapter 6: The Before- and Afterlife of Meter
Metrical Modernism
Make It Old: Robert Bridges and Obsolescence
Alice Meynell’s “English Metres”
Toward a Critical Prosody
Notes
Works Cited
Index