the discipline of meter 131
the Family”). In his critical attempt at simplicity, Newbolt faults both newspa-
per critics and random authorities (specifically “Evans on Versification”)^62 for
making arbitrary rules for poets to follow, especially rules that do not ac-
knowledge natural “stress” in English. “To everyone but a few makers of au-
thoritative books,” he contends, “the stresses in English are more important
than the syllables” (376). He continues, “look at the simplicity of it. You set
out to write a poem, say in short couplets; you put the words of your story in
their natural order, with their natural pronunciation and stresses; you do not
need to trouble yourself about iambs and trochees; anapaests or dactyls are no
more to you than anacondas or pterodactyls; when you have got four beats or
stresses you have got a line, and you go on to the next” (379).
Stressed verse will thrive in England because it has grown up in its “native
soil” (380). Newbolt is an advocate for simplicity, avoiding the kind of conser-
vatism and pedantry that he sees in critics and false prosodic authorities. Like
Saintsbury’s promotion of the foot as natural to an “English ear,” for Newbolt,
the Anglo-Saxon beat is simple and natural, with beats and stresses. This
movement toward Anglo-Saxon versification that Newbolt describes is similar
to the fantasy of classical meters in English that Arnold imagined, transposed
onto the new and more militaristic national metrical history of English. For
Arnold, that is, English meter would awaken a culture you did not know was
inside you and civilize you out of the masses and into a kind of distinction. For
Newbolt, the beat recognizes you and pulls you toward it, so that you became
not just part of a culture but of a nation, in the twentieth-century sense of the
word.
Despite Newbolt’s reputation for simplified meters and his attempt to ex-
plain English meter in the simplest terms, he was involved in the complicated
national debates concerning English education and meter’s complex role in
that curriculum. One way in which he sought to solidify meter’s role was by
urging his contemporaries to explore and solidify related or constituent terms
to meter, such as “rhythm.” As editor of The Monthly Review, Newbolt pes-
tered Bridges for ten years to write an article about rhythm that he could pub-
lish in the magazine. In 1900, Bridges wrote excitedly to Newbolt about his
preparations for the second edition of Milton’s Prosody. Looking at the man-
ner in which Bridges summarized his arguments to Newbolt, it is clear that
their correspondence, though perhaps not as technical as Bridges’s correspon-
dence with Joseph Mayor or Henry Bradley, contained discussions of English
meter.^63 On December 17th, 1902, Bridges responded to a letter from New-
bolt: “I will try and put together my ideas on rhythm for you this Xmas. I re-
ally think I can make the matter very simple, readable, and convincing” (422).
In January, Bridges writes: “I was quite forgetting about the Rhythm. It is de-
veloping — Will be in 3 parts as I see it now” (424).^64 And yet, in an April 3,
1903 letter, Bridges’s response to an inquiry by Newbolt shows how anxious
Newbolt was for some treatment of rhythm in English by Bridges, whereas