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complication of Arnold’s hope of intimate metrical civilization; here, poetry
has become an external cultural bond, a place to find patriotic sustenance,
community, and collective identity.
As organizations like the English Association (established in 1906) and the
Society for Pure English increasingly worried over the use of poetry and the
way it was taught, versification manuals rushed to provide structure to the
newly inspired poetry-writing masses. Joseph Berg Esenwein and Mary Elea-
nor Roberts’s The Art of Versification, published in 1913 and again in 1916,
was one of a surge of such manuals. They warned: “If you wish to turn your
philosophy, or your patriotism, or your religion, into poetry, well and good,
but the fact that your philosophy is deep, or your patriotism lofty, or your reli-
gion lovely, will not of necessity make your poetry so—the spirit must be
clothed upon with body, and the body must be of form suitable for the appar-
eling of so deep, lofty, and lovely a spirit.”^71
Notice how patriotism is interchangeable with religion here (a sentiment
also found in the 1914 introduction to Songs and Sonnets for England in War
Time: “God, His poetry, and His music are the Holy Trinity of war”^72 ). Meter,
Esenswein and Roberts’s book explains, means measure, and “the syllable
marked by the stress of the voice necessarily corresponds to the beat of the foot
in marking time.” English rhythm and meter are “born of music,” and “the
rhyming games of children are a survival of the primitive instinct to associate
foot-movements with chant or song.”^73 Going one step further than Saints-
bury, here, Esenwein and Roberts renaturalize the idea of the “foot” as a
human foot, attached to a dancing (marching ) body. Rhythm is a primal in-
stinct, as Newbolt argues, and so is our ability to mark, or measure that rhythm,
by literally moving our feet in time with the beat. This continuation of the
nineteenth-century naturalization of “the foot” takes away all foreign notions
of Greek terminolog y; indeed, even “the foot” is now linked to the nation’s
concerns.
The poems with less “delicacy of workmanship” are directed toward stirring
an audience to action. Along with countless war poetry anthologies, popular
Punch poetess Jessie Pope’s War Poems and More War Poems were published in
1915, followed in 1916 by Simple Rhymes for Stirring Times. Her poem “The
Call” at once evokes and mocks Newbolt’s patriotic verses: “When that pro-
cession comes, / Banners and rolling drums — / Who’ll stand and bite his
thumbs — / Will you, my laddie?” (ll. 21–24). Her poem, “Who’s for the
Game,” is a direct response to Newbolt’s “Vitae Lampada.” Pope’s poem
begins:
Football’s a sport, and a rare sport too,
Don’t make it a source of shame,
Today there are worthier things to do,