108 chapter 3
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 na-
tionalistic 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 expecta-
tions 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, patri-
otic 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 val-
ued by the culture of the twentieth century. Despite the complexities and
oversimplifications of the prosody wars, the phenomenon of actual war artifi-
cially 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 iden-
tifications, were matters of sheer and stubborn faith.