the trauma of meter 177
letters are vivid and humorous, they were not without joy—for all skill
is joyful—but felt bound, in the words of the best known, to plead the
suffering of their men. In poems that had for a time considerable fame,
written in the first person, they made that suffering their own. I have re-
jected these poems for the same reason that made Arnold withdraw his
“Empedocles on Etna” from circulation; passive suffering is not a theme
for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies;
in Greece the tragic chorus danced.^53Yeats’s protest against Owen shows how much form and content had become
separate issues in the 1930s, and allows us to consider retrospectively how the
reviews in 1920 still held poetry to a kind of formal national standard that
lingered in the culture despite the unresolved issue of how to teach prosody in
the classroom.
Yeats’s introduction makes no mention of the potential formal qualities of
Owen or any other war poet. Reviews in the 1920s, however, were nearly ob-
sessed with Owen’s formal experiments, perhaps desensitized to the subject
matter of the war due to those many anthologies to which Yeats refers. Owen’s
use of consonant and assonant rhyme, which he harmlessly called a “vowel-
rime stunt” in a letter to Sassoon, was often blamed (in reviews) for disfiguring
his verses, “preventing them from ever achieving greatness.” Owen had been
warned; as early as 1917, Robert Graves wrote, “Owen . . . you are a poet but
you’re a very careless one at present. One has to follow the rules of metre one
adopts. Make new metres by all means, but one must observe the rules where
they are laid down by the custom of centuries.”^54 Even in Graves’s chastisement,
“new metres” are expected to observe and respect the old ones. Owen believed,
like Bridges and Hopkins, that the boundaries of English prosody needed to
be expanded. His own preface, however, directed some reviewers to pay atten-
tion to the content of his poems (“the pity”) over the potential expansion he
was proposing in the poetry’s form.
Critics sentimentalized his early death, as in The Sunday Times in 1920: “in
him was lost to English literature a man who might have done much.”^55 And
acknowledging the instructive, journalistic quality of the verses, a reviewer for
The Daily Herald wrote, “[these poems] should be read by everybody who has
any sentimental illusions about the war.”^56 It was noble, but also dismissible,
that Owen and his editor Sassoon were both soldier-poets “attempting in En-
glish verse to express the inexpressible ‘real thing.’”^57 The Daily News and most
other papers concluded that the ‘real thing’ was pitifully inexpressible. How-
ever, an editorial choice by Sassoon leaves out the manuscript page, entitled:
“points to note about my Sounds,” in which Owen asserts that his sounds are
“1: ‘correct,’ as regards feet and rhyme, but the system of rhymes is not neces-
sarily classical; 2: they conform to the essential unity of idea and a solemn
dignity of the treatment.”^58 This small page indicates Owen’s awareness of and