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The Trauma of Meter

A thousand suppliants stand around thy throne,

Stricken with love for thee, O Poesy.

I stand among them, and with them I groan,

And stretch my arms for help. Oh, pity me!

—Wilfred Owen, “To Poesy” (1909)

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War

and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

—Wilfred Owen, unpublished “Preface” (probably May 1918)

Wartime, Poetics

The above epigraphs, written nine years apart, demonstrate a transition be-
tween Edwardian and Georgian poetics. Wilfred Owen, son of a stationmas-
ter and early “supplicant” to poetry, did not attend any of England’s great pub-
lic schools. He is, rather, a success story of the military metrical complex of
England’s state-funded school’s national curriculum. In Owen’s 1906 copy of
Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, he scribbled a circle around the word “Paeon” in
dark ink, writing out the definition in an adolescent scrawl: “A song in honor
of Appollo [sic] — a song of triumph.” English poetry had triumphed over the
classics as representative of the nation’s greatness for Owen and many other
poets of his generation. Classical meters were English meters and English po-
etry was the highest form of the country’s literature—a triumph, mostly, of
Edwardian education.
The story of the “Georgian Revolt” runs parallel to the story of the rise of
experimental Modernism in poetry. Robert Ross asserts that Georgian poetry
was part of the “larger twentieth-century revolt against Humanism;  .  . . the
poetic phase of a widespread revolt against Academism among all the arts;
and, specifically in the field of poetry, a reaction against the dead hand of the
Romantic-Victorian tradition.”^1 Critics who work on the coteries of the pe-
riod (the poets publishing in Edward Marsh’s wildly popular Georgian Poetry
series, the Imagists, the Futurists, and the Vorticists) tend to use “meter” as a
stand-in for convention and tradition in verse. But as we have seen, both mass