112 chapter 4
poetry from the front—became associated with English patriotism and, more
generally, with English meter, though it is altogether distinct from the pedan-
tic practice of scanning poetry along classical lines.
Newbolt—poet, prosodist, legislator, and propagandist—emerges as a cen-
tral and complicated figure whose work in all of these domains weaves a com-
plicated tapestry for the subsequent future of English meter in the national
imagination. Unlike Bridges (who compromised his metrical beliefs when he
published poems for the propaganda office), Newbolt both promoted and
capitalized on his role as a public poet marching to a particularly English
drum. The audience for poetry, at first attracted to but then powerfully re-
pelled by the patriotic impulse of his verse and the thousands of others like it,
developed a distaste for public “verse” in general and the amateur “versifiers”
who produced it. If simple, often ballad-like English patriotic verses were for
the masses, then the elite classes (and the “modernists”) began to imagine that
“Poetry” required a redemption that could only be achieved by the avoidance
of regular rhythm and patriotic themes. Pound’s line, “to break the pentame-
ter, that was the first heave,”^10 has been largely read as a salvo against outdated
Victorian metrical regularity; but the line itself is in pentameter: “to BREAK
the penTAMeter, THAT was the FIRST HEAVE,” and shows that neither
Pound’s reading of the nineteenth century, nor our reading of the modernist
reaction “against” meter, is as sharply defined as it seems. Rather than reading
the modernist “heave” as a break, this chapter complicates and enriches our
understanding of a period in which the generic understanding of English po-
etry was redefined, and shows the important ways that English meter was cen-
tral to that redefinition. One of the stakes of English meter in this period is
something quite different than our histories of poetics have imagined—not a
progress toward liberated modernist and postmodern form, nor a rejection of
Victorian form, but rather a fierce attention to a part of poetic form that has
been hidden in plain sight: the beat.
Matthew Arnold’s Metrical Intimacy
The 1861 Newcastle Commission “on the state of popular education in En-
gland” recommended that student teachers study English “just as the Greek
and Latin Classics are read in superior private schools.”^11 In 1867, English Lit-
erature was introduced as an optional special subject in schools, but according
to the Schools Enquiry Commission Report (otherwise known as the Taunton
Report) published in 1868, neither Latin nor Greek were taught in nearly half
of the endowed grammar schools.^12 In 1870, Forster’s Education Act encour-
aged the expansion of elementary education and the following year, English
literature was recognized as a class subject in the upper three grades (standards
four through six) of the now-compulsory elementary schools (47–48). Be-
cause of pressure from the “payment by results” scheme of the 1862 Revised