The Rise and Fall of Meter

132 chapter 4

Bridges’s concerns had turned almost entirely to the promotion of phonetic
spelling :

What seems to have happened is this: I asked if you would like a pho-

netic article. You replied. Yes of course I am expecting your article on

rhythm. I replied. I meant phonetics—to this no response. I therefore

thought no more of it. . . . Rhythm. This subject has a way of developing

in all directions. Better wait till you come down here. I am getting on

very well with it, but there is no hurry. I have written nothing.^65

Bridges felt that he had clarified Milton’s rhythms for the masses and had
moved on, at this point, to his more pressing concern with the salvation of
English through reformed spelling and signs for pronunciation. His com-
ment that “this subject has a way of developing in all directions” was a clar-
ification for Newbolt. Bridges had spent his career parsing out the compli-
cations of defining English prosody, and offered Newbolt some comments
on Newbolt’s own prosodic essay in 1908 (despite never finishing the essay
on “rhythm” that Newbolt had requested). Bridges writes: “your distinc-
tion between prosodies of blank verse and lyric seems misleading. What-
ever prosody lyric poetry may adopt in England, yet the best lyric in the
world (that is the best of Shelley and Keats) will preserve its prosody alive

.. .” Bridges goes on to explain the evolution of prosody to Newbolt in
a boxed diagram, showing a progression from quantitative, syllabic, and
stress prosodies into quantitative verse becoming syllabic and syllabic verse
giving way to stress. “I think that what happened may be exhibited in a
diagram” (552; see figure 3):

Again there was this similarity in methods 1 and 2, viz., that as in the

best syllabic verse the practice was sometimes unjustifiable on its own

theory, so in the best quantitative verse of the Greeks there is a free-

dom which allows many false quantities. What is sought is a beautiful

rhythm, and the value of the prosody is difficult to explain. But it would

seem absolutely necessary to have some recognized scheme as a basis;

and such a scheme, owing to the nature of language, must be in some

respects artificial, and this artificiality is a direction determined by the

scheme. (552–53)

Their correspondence primarily shows both parties’ involvements in the dia-
lectic regarding prosody in the context of national identity. But a secondary
revelation can be found here, as well: if Arnold’s intimate meter was distorted
into Newbolt’s national meter, then Bridges’s project of metrical multiplicity
represents a very different kind of nation than the one that Newbolt’s theories
propose, even if Bridges explains the evolution of stress verse as a natural pro-