resistance of the letter to any final critical judgement, it is by the same
token unable to communicate without such judgement.^33 In reading the
meanings of poetic form, that tension animates the many others to which
this book tries to do justice: private and public, free and determined,
poetic and historic and, not least, modernist and non-modernist.
Finally, in specific readings of the rhythm of such forms, I have
adopted Derek Attridge’s distinction between a beat (the places where
the metre of the poem leads the reader to expect a stress) and the stress
itself.^34 This distinction not only makes it easier to discuss the effects of
free and formal verse in the same breath, it puts the focus of rhythmic
analysis on mental processes rather than on an abstract standard of
correctness, which after all was one of the cardinal reasons for romantic
and modernist experiments in prosody. It was the mission of Coleridge,
and of Pound after him, to ensure that a rhythm was exactly congruent
with the passions that created it, and the following chapter examines the
problems they had, problems that began with Wordsworth.
14 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism