186 chapter 6
machine-like verses. But Pound’s retelling of literary history shows how little
he knew of the Anglo-Saxonist movements in England and America, though
his own interest in Anglo-Saxon was certainly a product of these. Likewise, by
dating “machine-like regularity” of “cast-iron” verses at mid-century, he sim-
plifies the projects of poets whom he knows are more metrically complex than
this history allows. But even if Bridges, architecturally, might be compared to
“a pseudo-renaissance classic façade,” Pound relents that there are poems in his
volume “comparable with the best in the language.” The review reveals both
Pound’s wish to be recognized as an authority (amid multiple competing au-
thorities: Saintsbury, Skeat, Mayor, Brewer, etc.) on matters metrical and his-
torical as well as his nearly resentful admiration for Bridges, whom he must
admit is already recognized—and should have broader recognition—as a mas-
ter of multiple metrical forms.
Two years before Pound’s review, Bridges published “A Letter to a Musician
on English Prosody” in the same issue of Poetry and Drama (1913),^9 in which
Edward Thomas published his views of war poetry and where Pound pub-
lished a number of poems. If Pound’s insistence, in “A Retrospect,” that poets
should “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a
metronome,” is abstract and collapses metrical regularity in all its forms to a
ticktocking time-keeper, Bridges’s explanation so intricately describes the
complexity and difficulty in the history and future of English metrical study
that his “letter,” in its very expertise, unseats Pound’s authoritative statements.
Even “a musical phrase” is troubled in Bridges’s account. Less a “letter” and
more a mini-metrical treatise along the lines of the views Bridges expressed in
Milton’s Prosody, the coexistence of these texts in the same periodical shows
how, despite Pound’s own narratives of rhythmic invention, he was aware of
—though pretended a willing ignorance of—the ways that other poets were
explaining and attempting to understand English verse rhythm. Lines from
Hugh Sewlyn Mauberly, in particular, gesture to his need for inclusion in this
rehistoricization of prosodic form. Participating in the same discourses as
Owen, Pound writes, “Died some, pro patria, / Non “dulce” non “et décor” . . . /
walked eye-deep in hell / believing old men’s lies, then unbelieving” (12). Why
would Pound, or any poet in the 1920s, buy into the broken promise of poetic
form in English? Pound engages with this metrical discourse at the same time
that he attempts to reject it so that he can position himself as the arbiter and
authority. Like Saintsbury and Patmore rejecting the metrists who came be-
fore them, Pound performs the characteristic move of negatively characteriz-
ing his predecessors. Though Pound was not a product of the English educa-
tion system, he was sufficiently educated to understand the ideologies of
English poetic form that he refused, yet at the same time could not help but
inhabit. Eliot’s poetry and prose are similarly inflected with traces of the rise
and fall of meter, and deserve reexamination along historical and prosodic
lines, as does the complex prosodic discourse and recasting of tradition evi-