146 chapter 5
and elite cultures were invested in a concept of English meter that stood for an
idealized “Englishness.” Pitting “Romantic-Victorian tradition” against “free
verse” skims over the ways that the Edwardian era specifically contributed to
both of those discourses. Owen, Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon are
poets and soldiers whose work benefits from reevaluation in the dynamic con-
text of metrical culture in England before and during the First World War. In
the first section of this chapter, I discuss how Owen and Graves were “suppli-
cants” to the Edwardian concept of English poetry in the early stages of the
war. Their transition to being “less concerned with poetry” has everything to
do with the way that English meter shaped how these soldiers approached
their service and how their ideas were changed by the pressures of modern
warfare. More specifically, their ideas about the communities of English meter
were both affirmed and complicated by the chaos of battle and neurasthenic
trauma. In this chapter, I read the trauma of soldiers’ experiences as a synecdo-
che for the dissolution of broader concepts about English national culture
during and after the First World War. The disciplining and ordering intention
that English meter accrues before the war becomes at once horrifying and
comforting during and after the war. The trauma of meter, for both soldier-
poets and early twentieth-century readers, was the realization that meter as a
stable category was illusory. To recover from trauma, through a method of
therapy provided by the very idea of “meter” that had betrayed them, was to
acknowledge the collective agreement—sometimes manifest as an individual
desperate need—to believe in meter’s stability anyway.^2
The phenomenon of wartime neuroses during the First World War forced
psychologists to fashion theories that grasped the centrality of practice to psy-
chic healing. In instances of neurasthenic trauma, often psychologists were
charged with the task of realigning linguistic ruptures, manifested by expres-
sive stammers or even complete aphasia. Owen was hospitalized for shell
shock and Graves was also prevented from returning to the front because of
his mental state. In the second section of this chapter, I juxtapose the interdis-
ciplinary techniques employed by Owen’s doctor, Captain Arthur J. Brock, a
classicist and sociologist on staff at Craiglockhart War Hospital, with the
methods of Dr. W.H.R. Rivers, an anthropologist fascinated by the theories of
Freud. For Brock’s patients, ordered activities provided a lifeline to the unique
social world of the hospital and surrounding town, forming a method of heal-
ing through which shell-shocked officers were efficiently “cured” so that they
could return to the front. The success of these “ordered activities” was particu-
larly remarkable for linguistic disorders. Rhythmically controlled time became
an empowering practice for patients adept at composing metrical verses; com-
posing in meter, for many patients trained in poetic craft, was a new kind of
therapeutic activity that coupled the expressive aspects of Freudian psycho-
therapy practiced by Dr. Rivers (narrating traumatic experiences in order to
“move through” them) with sociological ergo-therapy, or, “cure by function-