140 chapter 4
more memorable for its blatant patriotism. The poetry of Newbolt thematized
this “native rhythm” as something that would unify a collective to action,
pushing his drum trope far past propriety and toward a surreal, disconnected
sense of actual battle (or actual meter). Meanwhile, the prosody wars remained
unresolved, and poets like Bridges, Hardy, and Newbolt participated in a pub-
lic “metrical” project of publishing simple, patriotic poems for the masses
while at the same time continuing to write metrically innovative poems and
discuss the possibilities of English prosody among themselves.
For Bridges and Hardy, especially, the difference between the poems writ-
ten for the propaganda office and their usual output is especially remarkable,
and critical opinion has tended to ignore the war poems. Poet, critic, and sol-
dier Edward Thomas admired “Men who March Away,” calling the poem “the
only good one concerned with the war”^79 and describing it as “an impersonal
song which seems to me the best of the time, as it is the least particular and
occasional.” This commendation shows how, generally, Thomas was reticent to
embrace the poetry of wartime, but it also brings to light the continued dis-
continuity between the contemporary attitudes of poets and prosodists and
the historical narrative that defines them to later generations; Thomas, too,
has been characterized as a war poet. As early as 1914 in an article titled “War
P o e t r y ,”^80 Thomas criticized the speed with which poets wrote poems about
the war, noting that only
a small number of poems destined to endure are directly or entirely con-
cerned with the public triumphs, calamities, or trepidations that helped
to beget them. The public, crammed with mighty facts and ideas it will
never digest, must look coldly on poetry where already those mighty
things have sunk away far into “The still sad music of humanity.” . . . They
want something raw and solid, or vague and lofty and sentimental. (342)Thomas feels that the editors who publish these poems and the public who
consumes them are just as much to blame for the surge in bad war poetry as the
poets who write them—if, that is, they can be considered poets, and if these
are even poems. Thomas makes a clear distinction between “War Poetry” and
the “verses” or “hymns” that were flooding the public press. “A patriotic poem
pure and simple hardly exists,” he writes, adding that “[v]ery seldom are poems
written for occasions, great or small, more seldom for great than for small. But
verses are, and they may be excellent. Virtually all hymns are occasional verses”
(343). Thomas distinguishes between “poetry” and “verse” along the lines of
both content (verse takes on “occasions”) and quality (he intimates that if a
poem is patriotic, its quality suffers). Yet, Thomas does not condemn or exalt
either form outright; he merely distinguishes between them. He wants to
praise the better specimens of verse only if they are understood as such and not