the discipline of meter 143
attacked any more than hymns. Like hymns, they play with common ideas,
with words and names which most people have in their heads at the time . . .
they go straight to the heart of the great public which does not read poetry.”^85
Perhaps we could venture that they do not read poetry, but they have been
conditioned to read verse. This discourse was influenced, of course, by the
advent of literary Modernism, but it was also significantly influenced by the
institutions of the state that educated these certain people, this certain class,
to believe that English poetry was certainly accessible to them; by marching
in time with those simple rhythms, there was something both redemptive
and social in sending the poem home to be published. Victorian greats like
Hardy were writing this kind of poetry—even the poet laureate reeled off a
few verses—and there was something clearly hopeful and redemptive about
writing verse rather than poetry, or writing verse thinking that it was poetry.
Though these soldiers had been taught that English rhythms were their legacy,
their inability to manipulate more complex and subtle meters—their alien-
ation from English versification—prevented them, on the formal level, from
engaging in what the critics insisted was an exclusive definition of poetry.
Edmund Gosse’s 1917 review, “Some Soldier Poets,” catalogues some early
war poetry as if to place it prematurely in the context of English literary his-
tor y.^86 “The earliest expressions of lyric military feeling came from veteran
voices,” he writes, referring to Hardy and Bridges. He reports, “already, before
the close of autumn 1914, four or five anthologies of war-poems were in the
press, and the desire of the general public to be fed with patriotic and emo-
tional verse was manifested in unmistakable ways” (298). Indeed, it was the
audience for the poetry boom that amazed so many critics during the war.
Gosse continues,
The immediate success of the anthologies . . . proved that the war had
aroused in a new public an ear for contemporary verse, an attention
anxious to be stirred or soothed by the assiduous company of poets who
had been ripening their talents in a little clan. These had now an eager
world ready to listen to them. . . . There has never before, in the world’s
history, been an epoch which has tolerated and even welcomed such a
flood of verse as has been poured forth over Great Britain during the
last three years. These years have seen the publication, as I am credibly
informed, of more than five hundred volumes of new and original po-
etry. (298)Gosse and Woolf both recognize how the war facilitated the acceptance of
poetry—be it well crafted or “monotonous,” as Gosse calls it. The “delicacies of
workmanship” had, in many cases, been overshadowed by the need to stir “the
pulses of their auditors.” Just like Newbolt’s rhetoric at the beginning of the