134 chapter 4
recite a surprising number of separate poems, selected by themselves from
their antholog y, and have read and appreciated many others; [children] who
compile and transcribe anthologies of their own, and delight in composing of
poems.”^67 Children, in 1921, are not the issue. They have “a natural love for
beauty of sound, for the picturesque, the concrete, the imaginative, that is to
say, for poetry.” It is the teachers who need to be reined in. Teachers are warned
against “undue insistence on perfect memorizing, destructive explanations,
and ill-concealed indifference, or even distaste.” They must be especially tal-
ented to instruct their pupils in verse-writing, because “the danger is great that
principles of prosody, only half understood, or perhaps entirely erroneous,
may be enforced in such a manner as to reduce the lesson to a mere mechanical
drill” (110). Here is an echo of Arnold’s denigration of “mere verses” and a
strain of the intimate cultural discipline possible through those “great princi-
ples of prosody.” In the report, the pupil’s freedom is paramount—to choose
passages for memorization, to feel empowered to appreciate English literature.
English is the eye opener, the study that can refresh the pupil to the apprecia-
tion of all literature—even the classics. Newbolt’s report is a culmination of
trends that were solidifying over the course of the first twenty years of the
1900s. His postwar sentiment toward the English language, and English po-
etry, must be read in light of the way that English language, rhythm, and meter
had become severed from scientific or linguistic study in the Edwardian class-
room and transformed into an almost privileged birthright.^68 He writes, in the
introduction to his report, that the various influences, or tributaries, that
formed English literature, have been conquered by an idea of Englishness that
is understood to be native to England:
To every child in this country, there is one language with which he must
necessarily be familiar and by that, and by that alone, he has the power
of drawing directly from one of the great literatures of the world. More-
over, if we explore the course of English literature, if we consider from
what sources its stream has sprung, what tributaries it has been fed, and
with how rich and full a current it has come down to us, we shall see that
it has other advantages not to be found elsewhere. They are mingled in
it, as only in the greatest rivers they could be mingled, the fertilizing in-
fluences flowing down from many countries and from many ages of his-
tory. Yet all these have been subdued to form a stream native to our own
soil. The flood of diverse human experience which it brings down to our
own life and time is in no sense a degree foreign to us, but has become
the native experience of men in our own race and culture. (13)Newbolt’s legacy, then, is not only the patriotic verses for which he is known,
but also the way in which those verses exemplify the rhetoric that was being
played out in the classroom. Newbolt, in effect, subdued his own interests in