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century, poetry of the First World War is asked to both “stir” and to “subdue,”
and yet the distinction between poetry and verse is sharpened in this moment
by the thematic and formal evaluations of poets and critics like Thomas,
Murry, Gosse and, later, Pound, Eliot, and Yeats. Such poets and critics were
suspicious and tired of the outpouring of poems that spoke to a kind of collec-
tive Englishness, at the same time that they participated in the myth that true
poetry was what the nation needed in wartime. What began in the late nine-
teenth century with Matthew Arnold as a cultural dream of a nation intimately
civilized by poetic form transformed through the education system and the
poetry of Newbolt into a trope of drumbeats and militarism that was often
accompanied by simple poetic meters, which was then, in turn, supported by
established poets like Hardy and Bridges choosing to write verses that partici-
pated in this military metrical complex. In addition, the thousands of soldier
poets who had been conditioned in schools to “read verse,” were therefore
taught to imitate the patriotic rhythmic ideolog y—an embodiment of the
failure, really, of Arnold’s pedagogic project. The stigma of meter becomes, at
the end of the First World War, a stigma about militarism and its strong asso-
ciation with verse for England’s sake, with “meter” losing its variety and com-
plexity and marching to a very distinctive, yet still very English “beat.”