98 chapter 3
labic, 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 Eng-
lish 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 des-
perately 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 soldiers^54 —ac-
celerated 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, pro-
nunciation reforms to standardize English might erase some distinctions be-
tween the working- and upper classes.^55 Though this local application of edu-
cation 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 classi-
cal origins, and even away from the popular concept of feet, into a more capa-
cious metrical system. Sometimes this system was syllabic, sometimes accen-
tual, 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 accom-
panied by new anxieties about what English literary education meant for na-
tional culture. Educators and poets alike had high expectations for Saints-