180 chapter 5
contexts of national culture in which English meter’s instability played a
crucial role.
In his 1934, A Hope for Poetry, C. Day Lewis writes: “Gerard Manley Hop-
kins died young in the year 1889. His poems were not published until 1918,
the year Wilfred Owen was killed. Hopkins would have been a poet under any
circumstances: Owen, I am inclined to think, was made a poet by the war.”^64
Though Owen certainly identified himself as a poet before the war, the fact
that Lewis puts Hopkins and Owen together is important. As many scholars
have noted, the experiments of Hopkins when read in the context of the mod-
ernist avant-garde in 1918 seemed less revolutionary than they had in 1889.
Likewise, Owen’s poems seemed less revolutionary than they indeed were
when read in the context of the thousands of soldier poems and the output of
rhythmic, accentual verses of the early twentieth century. But Lewis’s assess-
ment, in 1934, is apt: “Owen commends himself to post-war poets largely be-
cause they feel themselves to be quite in the same predicament; they feel the
same lack of a stable background against which the dance of words may stand
out plainly, the same distrust and horror of the unnatural forms into which life
for the majority of people is being forced” (14). Hopkins knew already, and
agonized over, the lack of a stable background; in his way he and Bridges at-
tempted to invent new metrical possibilities. Owen was taught that the back-
ground was stable though it had never been; that was the trauma of meter for
him and many other soldier poets, and that is why their poetry deserves re-
evaluation in light of the competing metrical histories and shifting concepts of
national identity I am describing here.