the trauma of meter 153
and quoting this line to his mother: “If any man despairs of becoming a Poet,
let him carry his pack and march in the ranks.” He continued, “I don’t despair
of becoming a Poet. . . . Will you set about finding the address of the ‘Artists’
Rifles’ as this is the Corps which offers commissions to ‘gentlemen returning
from abroad’ ”(342). Artists’ Rifles interested Owen because Lord Leighton
(1830–96, president of the Royal Academy 1878–96), Millais (1829–96, Pre-
Raphaelite cofounder), and Forbes Robertson (1853–1937, actor and theater
manager), were all members, as he exclaimed to his mother in a letter two
weeks later. Once Owen enlisted and had begun his military training, how-
ever, he complained to his brother Harold that his poetic training was woe-
fully inept in the face of his new duties: “What does Keats have to teach me of
rifle and machine-gun drill, how will my pass in Botany teach me to lunge a
bayonet, how will Shelley show me how to hate or any poet teach me the tra-
jectory of the bullet?”^16 Owen may not have realized, at this stage, how much
poetry would help to keep him together on the battlefield, in the Casualty
Clearing Station, and at the War Hospital.
Apparently free of such hesitations, Robert Graves enlisted almost immedi-
ately after the outbreak of war. His first book of poems, Over the Brazier, how-
ever, “also contains poems in which he imagines his work’s reception and ques-
tions his relationship to the poetry he was taught to value. The book is divided
into three parts. The first part, “Charterhouse,” is the name of Graves’s public
school, where he encountered poetry for the first time; in his memoir, he re-
cords: “I found a book that had the ballads of ‘Chevy Chase’ and ‘Sir Andrew
Barton’ in it; these were the first two real poems I remember reading. I saw
how good they were.”^17 The poems in “Charterhouse” show an admiration for
“anthems, stately, thunderous” (“Ghost Music”) but also show Graves’s playful
and irreverent attitude toward the constraints of English meter. His long
poem titled “Free Verse” (reprinted as the final poem in his 1917 Fairies and
Fusiliers), begins:
I now delight
In spite
Of the might
And the right
Of classic tradition 5
In writing
And reciting
Straight ahead
Without let or omission
Just any little rhyme 10
In any little time
That runs in my head:
Because, I’ve said,