the trauma of meter 179
For the average reader, Murry intuits, there is something not quite right
about the unity of the poem, yet for Murry the strangeness is part of the po-
etry’s point: the poem’s form is forged artificially and aware of its artificiality,
but for the average reader who has been conditioned to expect a different kind
of poetic form, this artificiality was a jarring flaw. A Manchester Guardian re-
viewer eagerly attacks Owen’s experiments for “a calculated deflection from
the kindred points of heaven and home, which are rhymes.”^62 By avoiding this
“tonal completeness,” the reviews agree that Owen’s form distances the reader
from these perfected and accepted forms of English verse. His rhyming is “re-
moved,” and the poems, like an irresponsible officer leading us astray, “lose
command of the ear.”
That Owen would be expected to have command of an “ear,” and that his
divergence from this responsibility brings him away from spiritual and na-
tional success (heaven and home), are concerns that we have seen predicated
in the Edwardian classroom. It is this attempt to align poetic form with heaven
and home that is so distasteful to 1930s-era reviewers, who read war poetry
because it is “important” but not necessarily because it is good poetry. Yeats,
again, summarizes this tendency with his defensive misreading of Owen’s
poetry:
My antholog y continues to sell & the critics get more & more angry.
When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the
poets’ corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a
revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has
put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Mu-
seum—however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the
same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in
Faber’s Antholog y—he calls poets ‘bards,’ a girl a ‘maid,’ & talks about
‘Titanic wars’). There is every excuse for him but none for those who
like him... .”^63Yeats’s focus on Owen’s early, less experimental poems, unfairly places
him among those poets who had not yet discovered the possibilities of
stretching English meter’s limit. In Yeats’s letter, Owen’s poetry stands in
for the products of Edwardian education, antholog y culture, and easy-to-
swallow “Georgian” poetry. What Owen’s poetry—indeed, what a reevalu-
ation of poetry from this period—teaches us is that in order to rehisto-
ricize the complicated role meter played in Edwardian education and in
the prosody wars, we must resist the temptation to be dismissive when the
products of prosodic experiment are perhaps not as experimental as they
could be: like Pound’s disappointment with Bridges (which we will ex-
amine in the concluding chapter) and Yeats’s resistance to Owen—rather,
we must see Owen’s poetry as the outcome of the dynamic and changing