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The Before- and Afterlife of Meter

If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules over the mental

experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are

not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known.

Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure.

—Alice Meynell, The Rhythm of Life

See, they return; ah, see the tentative

Movements, and the slow feet,

The trouble in the pace and the uncertain

Wavering!

—Ezra Pound, “The Return”

Metrical Modernism

Few writers benefitted more from the boom in soldier poetry and the explo-
sion of popular verses during the First World War than the poets associated
with what we now call “modernism.” But modernist writers, especially, deserve
reconsideration and recontextualization within the shifting cultural and edu-
cational contexts of the Edwardian and Georgian eras. In “Prolegomena,” pub-
lished in Harold Monro’s Poetry and Drama in 1912,^1 Ezra Pound writes, “I
believe in an ‘absolute rhythm,’ a rhythm, that is, in poetry which corresponds
exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed. A man’s rhythm
must be interpretive, it will be, therefore, in the end, his own, uncounterfeit-
ing, uncounterfeitable.” If the poetry of Newbolt was arguing for a collective
“metrical” national identity (that Newbolt and Bridges nonetheless under-
stood as highly individualized), then Pound replied with an even more indi-
vidualized idea of rhythm—something that begins and ends with each poem.
In “A Few Don’ts,” published in Poetry magazine in 1913, Pound continues to
imagine rhythm as individual and authentic as opposed to the collective coun-
terfeit of metric patterns—a divide, I argue, between an at-once individual
and universal “rhythm” and an elite, external, and artificial “meter” that he
narrates as if it is distinct from his own metrical investigations, the expired
product of another age. It is important to recall, too, that the artificial “meter”