the discipline of meter 123
When he asks his sister why she doesn’t look at them, she replies: “I don’t like
to see them—they’re dressed like that to go to their death.” The small section
of the chapter is titled “The Sound of Death,” and he concludes it by meditat-
ing : “I had no sense of grief or fear—only a sudden intimation that there was
something mysterious happening or about to happen, something which made
these soldiers grander and more beautiful, but at the same time took them
away for always, beyond our sight and hearing” (9). Newbolt never served in
the military; he quit practicing law to write poetry when he achieved near-
overnight fame for his 1897 book, Admirals All. His poems and stories fo-
cused on tales of soldiers and patriotic glory, which meshed perfectly with the
expectations of “English literature” for children brought up with the recita-
tion readers and drill culture of the state-funded English education system.
Despite this mass-cultural popularity, however, Newbolt was associated more
immediately with public school culture, a certain elite class of readers. By unit-
ing both audiences in a metrical community, Newbolt bridged a divide be-
tween English literary and classical education. This bridge allowed for the in-
stitutionalization of English literary study in ways that Arnold had hoped
for—that is, with the study of English literature forming the basis of a sound
humanistic education—and in many ways that he had not. Newbolt’s poetry
was hugely popular and, in its popularity, accessibility, and themes, associated
his own brand of swinging English meter to blind English patriotism. New-
bolt worked toward institutionalizing English studies, greatly impacting the
study of prosody: in 1906 he was instrumental in the creation and activities of
the English Association (the organization that ensured English literature
would find its role as a school subject); he wrote poetry and novels for the
government propaganda office during the First World War; in 1921 he was the
primary author of The Teaching of English in England; and in the 1920s he
edited his own series of schoolbooks for Nelson’s. But for Newbolt, as seen in
his reaction to the drum-and-fife passage of his autobiography quoted above,
Patmore’s metrical “ictus” was a drum-beat linked to English military action.
The lasting impact of Newbolt on the study of English prosody was not his
work to institutionalize English studies, but specifically the way his poetry
unified a collective readership for rhythmic, patriotic poetry that embodied
Arnold’s metrical intimacy so widely and broadly that it became artificial once
again, seen and heard as a jingoistic anomaly that clanged falsely in the differ-
ently tuned ears of post–First World War readers.
Newbolt’s role in popularizing a certain concept of literary Englishness has
been viewed as the last gasp of an idealized Victorian imperial stance, from its
promotion of the public school values of athleticism and sacrifice to its per-
ceived jingoism.^43 It is commonplace among scholars of experimental Mod-
ernism to show how Newbolt’s particular brand of blind patriotism and poetic
propaganda provided the backdrop against which the international move-
ments of experimental Modernism rebelled.^44 But Newbolt’s poems were