the before- and afterlife of meter 185
Pound that the poet whose legacy he was trying to desperately to unseat had,
with The Testament of Beauty, outsold and outshone the kind of poetry Pound
wanted to promote. Though Pound only stated his condemnation of Bridges
privately, it shows how much Pound revised his views toward poetic mastery
in the years after the war. The younger, less famous Pound felt little but envy
for the poet laureate in October 1915, when he reviewed Bridges’s Poems
Written in 1913 in Poetry Magazine: “beyond dispute, his command of the
sheer mechanics of quantitative verse can be looked on with nothing but envy.
I have a grave respect for any man who is restless and persistent in the study
and honor of his craft.”^8 Pound singles out two poems from the volume, “Fly-
catchers,” which I discussed in chapter 3, and “a brief epigram, bitter as Pal-
ladas, full of emotional violence held in by rigid, delicate barriers “[title in
Greek]”:
Who goes there? God knows. I’m nobody. How shall I answer?
Can’t jump over a gate nor run across the meadow.
I’m but an old whitebeard of inane identity. Pass on.
What’s left of me today will very soon be nothing. (43)Though Bridges’s verses, as Pound predicted, have been forgotten in contem-
porary discussions of literary modernism, exhuming Bridges’s works might
“embalm” him (and provide “summation“) differently than the “enbasalma-
tion” Pound eventually imagined. But earlier in the same review, Pound out-
lines how little poets know of accentual and quantitative verse today, writing a
brief history of all verse forms as essentially free (including “vowel-chants”
from Eg ypt and “polyrhythmical sequairies and litanies” from the middle
ages) and then continuing to blame the metrical rigidity on mid-Victorian
culture:
And after all these things came the English exposition of 1851 and the
Philadelphia Centennial, introducing cast-iron house decorations and
machine-made wood fret-work, and there followed a generation of men
with minds like the cast-iron ornament, and they set their fretful de-
sire upon machine-like regularity. . . . [T]he indigenous Anglo-Saxon
rhythms were neglected because society did not read Anglo-Saxon.
And the most imitative generation of Americans ever born on our con-
tinent set themselves to exaggerating the follies of England. (41)Though Pound is aware that Bridges’s name “is almost a synonym for classic
and scholarly poetry,” he resents that Bridges’s knowledge of verse form could
lead him to name one of the poems in his new volume an “experiment in free
verse,” calling it a “smack in the eye” to the provincials who merely imitate