the discipline of meter 111
funded classrooms of the lower and middle classes, on the other.^5 Looking
only at the examinations based on the Revised Code (the series of reforms
in the 1860s called “payment by results,” which rewarded schools for passing
their students through tests in “reading, writing, and arithmetic”), we miss the
more nuanced, metrical ways that English poetry performed patriotic ideolo-
gies in the state-funded classroom. Arnold, like many prosodists I described
in the previous chapter, valorized the formative disciplinary aspects of the
poetry recitation lesson not because of the subject matter of the poems but
because of an idealized concept of rhythm. The poetry in the English language
classroom, despite its questionable metrical quality, contained lessons meant
to imprint good English morals (the progress of the child into citizen) or his-
torical narratives that joined England’s military past to the sturdy rhythms
of school poems (the progress of the nation). In this period, I argue, we can
trace a public conception of English verse form that has little to do with the
controversies about iambs and trochees that raged throughout the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, and everything to do with a concept of national
history, rhythmically marching through time to a naturally, instinctively felt
“beat.” This “beat” had been argued by Edwin Guest and his followers (prac-
titioners of “Guestianity,” as Saintsbury derisively calls them) to be “native” to
England as opposed to the foreign imposition of classical verse forms and, an
obsession with the “beat” as a native instinct mapped easily onto the philologi-
cal fascination with Anglo-Saxon origins though it had existed as “emphasis”
and “accent” in prosodic discourse prior to the nineteenth century. Recall that
Guest’s A History of English Rhythms was published in 1838; in 1882, Walter
William Skeat, a prominent Cambridge professor of Anglo-Saxon (and editor
of the Etymological English Dictionary from 1879–82, and 1910), reprinted
it.^6 Saxon-centric accounts of England’s history in the nineteenth century
(above all, as Asa Briggs has noted, in radical writing )^7 trickled into the late
nineteenth-century classroom, where textbooks in history that were used pri-
marily in the state-funded schools promoted racial Anglo-Saxonism as Eng-
lish national identity.^8
Outside the classroom, the controversy about how to define or measure the
beat, or accent, concerned prosodists, physiologists, and educators well into
the twentieth century. But concurrently, for the average schoolchild, this beat
was simply, naturally “English.” The public conception of English rhythm ob-
fuscated the more complicated distinctions between accent and quantity, fe-
tishizing the metrical “ictus” (defined by Patmore in 1857 as the “beat” and
abstracted to mean “accent,” as in a beat that is “marked by accent,” according
to Patmore)^9 as the primary “pulse” of English poetry and national culture
through the ages. The circulation of poetry with a distinctive stress-based
rhythm—begun in classroom verses, thematized in poetry by Henry Newbolt,
and later, poets as diverse as Edward Thomas, Thomas Hardy, and Jessie Pope,
and satirized in newspapers tired of the overwhelming outpouring of patriotic