182 chapter 6
of patriotic poetry was already an abstracted, misrepresentative description for
rhythm. To Pound, the collective military-metrical project I described in
chapter 4 is read as derivative; they merely “shovel” in words to “fill a metric
pattern or to complete the noise of a rhyme-sound.”^2 Pound not only misun-
derstands the upsurge in a rousing Edwardian English accentual rhythms as
“metric” (and forgivably so), he is also suspicious of the simultaneous obses-
sion with defining English meter for the discipline of English literary study
and linguistic science. Pound advocates a simultaneous awareness of and need
for historical forms as well as a complete disregard for them at the moment of
writing. He writes “[p]ay no attention to the criticism of men who have never
themselves written a notable work. Consider the discrepancies between the
actual writing of the Greek poets and dramatists, and the theories of the
Graeco-Roman grammarians, concocted to explain their meters.” Rather than
reading metrical explanations, he suggests, “let the candidate fill his mind with
the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language” (4, 5). If
grammar fixes and stabilizes, so, too, by extension, does meter. Pound’s desire
for a rhythmic fluidity rests on a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach
to poetic form; and yet “to describe” would be also to fix. By assuming that
“cadences” can be absorbed phenomenologically, somehow at the level of “in-
stinct,” Pound both troubles and supports the assumption of inherent abstract
national rhythms so promoted by the grammarians of the eighteenth century
through Henry Newbolt. And yet, rather than a universal “Englishness,” the
cadences and rhythms Pound supposes for poetry are somehow universally
“poetic”—beyond the realm of grammar or meter, and require the “shock and
stroke” of each individual.^3
Pound’s belief in an at once “universal” and “individual” rhythm was, in
many ways, as class-determined as Saintsbury’s or Bridges’s. By shoveling
words into preexistent molds, poets employing a metric pattern without mak-
ing it their own were guaranteeing their obsolescence and displaying their vul-
garity, their lack of an elite understanding of ancient forms. (Indeed, the class
implication of Pound’s day-laborer word choice shows that he is much more
aligned with the educated elite than the common man that he implies he
would be freeing from the shackles of meter.) He admits that he has devoted
himself to “the ancients” (“pawed over”) in order “to find out what has been
done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again” and yet he con-
cludes, “I doubt if we can take over, for English, the rules of quantity laid down
for Greek and Latin, mostly by Latin grammarians.” Pound reveals his famil-
iarity with Bridges’s experiments here, but puts himself in Bridges’s role: the
only mention of Bridges, however, is to admit that “Robert Bridges” is “seri-
ously concerned with overhauling the metric, in testing the language and its
adaptability to certain modes.”^4 Yet his vitriol against “the metric” is every-
where evident; Pound continues to elaborate on the violence of traditional
metrics: “don’t chop your stuff into separate iambs. Don’t make each poem