the discipline of meter 141
if they are held to the standards he reserves for poetry. This reservation can be
attributed to his belief that verses “are written for a certain people or a certain
class. The writer of hymns or patriotic verses appears to be a man who feels
himself always or at the time at one with the class, perhaps the whole nation”
(343). These verses, which are not “great poetry” nor are they “what is wanted,”
are written by a writer “who picks up popular views or phrases, or coins them,
and has the power to turn them into downright stanzas” (344). To this re-
viewer, verses that are meant for something other than mere diversion are dan-
gerous—rather than convince you to follow along to the beat of a country’s
drum, they are artificially, dishonestly asking you to follow along to your
death. The simple verse form comes to signify artificial patriotic sentiment as
well as dishonest forms in general.
Like Hardy, Bridges, and Newbolt, Thomas participated in the patriotic
poetics of the First World War but still reserved judgment for the “verses” that
he felt were beneath him. Thomas felt that Kipling and Newbolt “belong to a
professional class apart” and hoped that others, like Hardy, would write “even
better yet,” expecting “the work of other real poets to improve as the war ad-
vances, perhaps after it is over, as they understand it and themselves more com-
pletely” (344). Part of the reason that Kipling and Newbolt were considered
poets distinct from those pouring out military verse is because they had al-
ready distinguished themselves, as discussed above, as poets whose main theme
was, in some way or another, English national identity.
In To The Lighthouse (1927), a novel that famously relegates death and war
to parentheses, Virginia Woolf brackets the observation that “the war, people
said, had revived their interest in poetry.”^81 However, the martial rhythms of
patriotic pedagog y had laid the groundwork for what many editors called
a “poetry boom.” In 1917, Harold Monro, editor of Poetry and Drama and
owner of “The Poetry Bookshop,”^82 complained, “we find ourselves at this
moment almost unprovided with verse that we should care to publish.”
Rather than understanding the overwhelming public output of poetry as a
result of the rhythmic-imperial education provided in the Edwardian pe-
riod or the outpouring of metrical handbooks participating in the prosody
wars, Monro blames the proliferation of simplified metrical verses, which he
refuses to call poetry, on sheer ardent patriotism: “We get the impression of
verse-writers excitedly gathering to do something for their flag, and as soon
as they begin to rack their brains how that something may be done in verse,
a hundred old phrases for patriotic moments float in their minds, which
they reel into verse or fit into sonnets—and the press is delighted to publish
t h e m .”^83
In the same vein, The Egoist published a poem under the pseudonym “Her-
bert Blenheim,” titled, “Song : In War-time,” mocking the proliferation of war-
time metrical verses in the public press: