130 chapter 4
been exposed by 1918 as a false rhythm, unnatural and horrifying, and even
more offensive than the popular poetry of the thousands of patriotic poets
whose work flooded the public press at the beginning of the war.^60 In his
“masque,” Newbolt wrenches the funeral march into triumph, again eerily
yoking the drumbeat of the nation to a death march. The only poem in which
Newbolt imagines himself on the actual front, “A Letter from the Front” is
also the only one in “free verse,” as if the scene of an English officer with a do-
mestic cat on the front was somehow inappropriate for meter. English rhythm,
in Newbolt’s hands, is pure propaganda; without duty and imperial sacrifice,
there is no need to shape rhythm into lines at all. Unlike for Bridges, who felt
that free verse and other experiments could fit into a shifting and dynamic
English national identity, able to accommodate multiple forms, for Newbolt,
meter without patriotism would not fit into his project of a collective metrical
and national identity.
Private Meters, Public Rhythms
Newbolt realized Arnold’s dream of a cultural metrical identity by way of
institutionalizing a military-metrical complex. Yet this was not the whole
story. Newbolt defined and troped a national rhythm in his poetry, naturally
felt, one to which Englishmen instinctively responded. However, Newbolt,
like Robert Bridges and George Saintsbury before him, was also a classically
educated Englishman, and so despite the rhythmical rigor of his widely pub-
lished poetry, he was still perplexed, like many writers in the period, about the
problem of maintaining a distinction between the “natural” rhythms that he
promoted in his poetry and the pedagog y that would line up those rhythms
into an order that could be called an “English meter.” Rather than promote
the monolithic military-metrical complex in which his poems participated,
his writing on prosody reveals a compromise between the way that poetry
should be read, written, and understood by mass culture and the way that
poetry, at a higher, more technical level, should be classified and discussed
by the more educated classes and then disseminated to the culture at large.
His 1904 essay, “The Future of English Verse,” shows that he, too, wants to
protect the less educated from the complications of versification, though he
longs to provide an explanation that will allow the layperson some measure
of understanding :
“[T]o any but a very intelligent and cultivated audience I should not . . .
suggest that blank verse is not the simplest thing in the world. As Mr. Bridges
has said, ‘Most “lovers of poetry” merely love sing-song : ritum, ritum, ritum is
rhythm to them, and anything which will not go ritum, ritum is harsh.”^61 New-
bolt agrees with Bridges that an education in English meter is not necessary in
order to love poetry. His meditation on variety in blank verse gives way to a
history of English versification beginning with Latin verse (“the Founder of