the trauma of meter 149
English Poetry provided comfort for soldiers on the front, they neglected to
discuss how soldier-poets had been trained, prewar, in the particularities of
English poetic craft. Soldier-poets were conditioned by the martial meters of
patriotic verses in schoolbooks and the public press before and during the war
to see themselves as part of a collective English culture, bound to defend the
language of Shakespeare. Heroic patriotism had been portrayed through a par-
ticular kind of English metrical poetry that was often directly allied to military
service. Military and metrical drill, as I explored in the previous chapter, relied
on similar ideologies of discipline and protecting the “mother country.”
Though these poetic practices provided comfort for soldiers on the front,
there is also evidence that many soldier-poets were already questioning the
rhetoric of formal Englishness that prewar poetry promoted. In No More Pa-
rades (1925), Ford Madox Ford presents a fictionalized account of how En-
glish poetic forms were used to counter the effects of mental crises. The pro-
tagonist, Tietjens, attempts to write his way out of a nervous breakdown by
speedily composing a sonnet: “He said to himself that by God he must take
himself in hand. He grabbed with his heavy hands at a piece of buff paper and
wrote on it in a column of fat, wet letters:
a b b a a b ba, and so on.”^6Tietjens writes the sonnet in “two minutes and eleven seconds” on “buff ”
paper with “fat,” “wet” letters, the upright letters taking on the traits of a
healthy body. Immediately after, the broken-down bodies of soldiers enter the
room, returning from battle: “[t]heir feet shuffled desultorily; they . . . held in
unliterary hands small open books that they dropped from time to time.” Ti-
etjens’s empowered “literary” hands act of their own volition, writing the son-
net as he barks orders simultaneously to men around him, careful “never to
think on the subject of a shock at the moment of a shock.”^7 Captain Tietjens’s
hands, in their practiced exercise of writing in English meter, order his mind so
that he can continue to give orders to the men around him—“unliterary” men
whose own “feet” shuffle aimlessly. Predicated by the national curriculum and
by the resulting inundation of popular war poems in the public press, military
feet and metrical feet are joined here—not to inspire a patriotic collective, but
rather to allow for the automatic composition of a line meant to discipline and
protect an individual officer and then his company.