150 chapter 5
Ford’s fictional account renders all the more illuminating the fact that in
addition to poetry anthologies, Wilfred Owen owned the 1908 reprint of R.
F. Brewer’s popular manual, Orthometry, or, The Art of Versification and the
Technicalities of Poetry.^8 This handbook encourages poets to understand metri-
cal laws so as to “at least accustom the beginner to the proper use of his feet
before trusting him to untried wings,” and praises how English poetic forms
have become successfully imprinted in the minds of all Englishmen. Brewer’s
manual declared that
[t]he study of our poets has now happily attained a footing in the cur-
riculum of nearly all our public schools and colleges; while the millions
who attend our elementary schools have suitable poetic passages indel-
ibly impressed upon their memory in youth. All but pessimists antici-
pate good results of this early training upon the tastes and re-creative
pleasures of young England of the twentieth century. (ix–x)Ford, Owen, Graves, and Sassoon were all products of an education system
that “impressed upon their memory in youth” memorable passages from En-
glish poetry. In a wartime context, memorized poetic forms took on new
meaning. It is not only the “re-creative” pleasure of writing poetry (read both
as “recreation” and that which can be created again and again), but also the
importance of training that emerges when these prosodic discourses are con-
sidered in light of actual military operations. The idea of using writing as a
form of mental ordering relied on the assumption that education had done its
work before the war; traditional poetic forms had to have been successfully
inscribed into an officer’s memory for them to be used as aids in his rehabilita-
tion. Even to the nonofficer class, marching songs and other forms of patriotic
narratives had been passed down by the school system wherein military drill
and metrical drill had been established as counterparts in the late nineteenth
c entur y.^9 How did the war refashion the disciplinary and therapeutic aspects
of metrical writing?
Sad Death for a Poet!
In 1913, Owen wrote to his mother that he was leaving the Vicarage at Duns-
den, escaping the “hotbed of religion” and murdering his “false creed,” that is,
leaving the Church of England. He imagines how poetry will now become his
religion:
It has just struck me that one of the occult Powers that Be may have
overheard the ancient desire of my heart to be like the immortals, the
immortals of earthly Fame, I mean, and is now on a fair way to granting
it. . . . Only where in me is the mighty power of Verse that covered the