the trauma of meter 147
ing” promoted by Captain Brock. Brock’s method also promoted a different
kind of metrical culture—which we could call “metrical” insofar as temporal
and spatial ordering become more important than narrative and/or expressive
models.
Ordering time and prosodic ordering at Craiglockhart illustrate, in micro-
cosm, many wartime and postwar anxieties about poetic form. Soldiers at the
hospital were reeducated to embrace forms and orders that had become mean-
ingless to them while at the same time they were encouraged to express their
mistrust of all forms and orders. That is, while soldiers participated in ordered
activities designed to help them reintegrate into the social world, they were
also encouraged to express their emotions and feelings freely through Freud-
ian talk-therapy. Sassoon and Owen, who were patients of Dr. Rivers and Cap-
tain Brock, respectively, both composed poems at the hospital that deserve
rethinking within these new psychotherapeutic models of poetic production:
specifically, through the continuous supplementary aspect of Freudian narra-
tion, on the one hand, and the active metrical exercise of fitting fragments of
experience into a predetermined order, on the other. This metrical writing
under the auspices of rehabilitation promised to reintroduce the writer to the
social world through the history of form.
As I have discussed in the preceding chapters, poetic meter was increasingly
seen as a symbol of English national culture in this period. However, until re-
cently, poetic meter has seldom been considered a historically significant con-
nection to the social world. Indeed, meter is rarely discussed in detail in the
many classic texts about First World War poetry. Paul Fussell, author of the
two monumental texts Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (1965) and The Great
War and Modern Memory (1975), was close to connecting soldier-poetry to
English national meter, but read tropes and myth making in soldier-poetry as
preconditions of the ironic modern age. In a discussion of Cowper’s “The
Castaway” in relation to Edmund Blunden’s “Rural Economy,” Fussell ac-
knowledges “an English reader would find it hard to experience that stanza
form without recalling at least bits of Cowper’s poem.”^3 What Fussell means is
“an English reader” who had read a good deal of Cowper and knew his par-
ticular poetic form. Fussell is mainly interested in intertextual images, sym-
bols, and pastoral allusions, but he acknowledges that Blunden may be aware
of the “artistic shape in which he has lodged” his “concern,” tracing the “sem-
blance” between himself, Cowper, and the men who appear in his poem. It is
surprising that Fussell uses the verb “lodged” for Blunden’s choice of form, as
if Blunden had Cowper’s poetic form in mind and either moved his sentiment
inside the intact meter or stuck it there by force. The semblance at which Fus-
sell hints, however, is precisely the substance of intertextual meter; it ties
Blunden to his distinctively English past, and writes him into the history of
“immortalizing” the dead who may or may not be redeemed. Cowper’s “Cast-
away” would have been a useful reference for Fussell: “tears by bards or heroes