the before- and afterlife of meter 183
stop dead at the end, and then begin every next line with a heave. Let the be-
ginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a
definite longish pause.”^5 Pound’s language supports the narrative of a violent
break with the past as well as the violence that meter can do to a poem. He
narrates “rhythm” as an ideal hybrid form that mediates between the individ-
ual and the community, and yet his assumption that any and all metrical sys-
tems are hegemonic and rigid belies his ignorance of nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century poetics. Indeed, the modernist revival of the term “cadence”
rather than “meter” or “rhythm” marks a return to Lindley Murray’s original
1795 definition of versification, back to elocution and performance imagined
through the image of the printed page. Everything should be fluid; even the
“pause,” a primary element of versification, is abstracted into “definite longish.”
Though bad poetry will begin the next line “with a heave,” Pound will redraw
the lines of poetic tradition by declaring in his Pisan Cantos more than forty
years later the famous statement I quoted earlier: “To break the pentameter,
that was the first heave” (Canto 81). The first “heave” was really Pound’s mis-
reading of nineteenth-century meter, or rather, collapsing a variety of metrical
experiments into one collective project of predictable verses. Pound did not
“break” the pentameter, as his five-beat line roughly demonstrates, but he
dares us to dwell on his “that” after the “break” of the midline caesura, as if to
cast his line precariously into four beats. But I have shown the artificiality of
“that” break, or Pound’s imagined divide, and argued why and how the pen-
tameter and the four-beat line would have been something that so many poets
invested with meaning, and how one or the other could be read as variously
“natural” or “artificial.” Pound knew that to retroactively impose a structure on
the past would allow him to bury it, exhume it differently, and make it part of
his own invention. However, this same retroactive imposition of stability is
strikingly similar to what was happening in English meter with the burial and
exhumation of classical meters from the end of the nineteenth to the early
twentieth centuries. The perceived stability of English metrical forms was
based on a variety of factors, but it was the supposed stability of classical me-
ters on which English meter was ostensibly, partially, and perhaps erroneously
based in the late nineteenth century. In fact, fewer and fewer poet-critics be-
lieved in this particular classical metrical genealog y. Pound’s infamous “break”
with the pentameter and his restrictions against using “strict iambs” obfuscates
the rich heritage of experiment, debate, and contested metrical discourses that
circulated throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Later
on in “A Retrospect,” Pound muses, “I think progress lies rather in an attempt
to approximate classical quantitative metres (NOT to copy them) than in a
carelessness regarding such things.”^6 He adds the note, “let me date this state-
ment to 20 August 1917,” significantly indicating that, in 1917, there were
various kinds of experiments at work in the field of English meter and that vers
libre was just one of a multitude of possibilities in the early twentieth century.