184 chapter 6
Pound neglects to mention, perhaps because he would rather not acknowl-
edge it, that meter in the Victorian era was similarly experimental, contested,
and varied—a proliferation of concepts rather than a unified field.
As I have by now made quite clear, Bridges’s exacting prosodic experi-
ments—themselves evidence of the proliferation of concepts about verse
form—have been overshadowed by the more popular free verse experiments
of Pound, Eliot, Williams, and other artists associated with the anti-Georgian
literary movements of the 1910s and 1920s, embedded though those experi-
ments were with various metrical forms not at all “free.” The divide between
poet-prosodists like Bridges and Pound parallels the divide between the for-
mal investigations of linguistics departments and those of English depart-
ments, in which the constant search for a “right” answer and the abstraction of
metrical form secures that the very freedom it allows will be just flexible
enough to survive as the kind of law about which professors like to argue.
Pound and Bridges, however, were more alike than either acknowledged. In
1936 Pound refused to write a short memoir of Bridges, joking to Eliot,
I take it all I gotter do is to talk about Britches, not necessarily read the
ole petrifaction? . . . Rabbit Britches indeed!!! . . . proposed title of arti-
cle: ‘Testicles versus Testament.’ An embalsamation of the Late Robert’s
Britches. All the pseudo-rabbits: Rabbit Brooke, Rabbit Britches . . . I
spose I can cite what I once said of Britches? I managed to dig about 10
lines of Worse Libre out of one of his leetle bookies. Onct. And then
there iz the side line of Hopkins. . . . In fact, the pooplishers ought to do-
nate a Hopkins and the Hopkins letters so az to treat Britches properly.
Background for an article that wdn’t be as dull, oh bloodily, as merely
trying to yatter about wot he wrote.^7The association of Robert Bridges with Rupert Brooke (Rabbit Brooke) here
is significant. Both “rabbits” are infantilized, indeed animalized through
Pound’s dialect. Though ostensibly phonetic, Pound’s playful dialects also ef-
face the serious phonetic experiments of Shaw, Bridges, and other phoneti-
cians in the early twentieth century—the very discourse that has continued to
trouble over the problem of pronunciation and versification in linguistics to
this day. But more importantly, by placing Bridges alongside the war hero Ru-
pert Brooke, Pound essentially devalues Bridges’s experiments, experiments
that Pound himself had valued at the start of his career—although he does
know that Bridges should be treated “properly,” “wot he wrote” is somehow
instantly forgettable, as forgettable as any war poet.
In a letter dated the next day, Pound decides to not even attempt an article
about Bridges, saying it would be a “falsification of values” and that Bridges is
already “a corpse of the null” (280, 281). His mention, in the prior letter, to
The Testament of Beauty is also a show of how frustrating it must have been for