the before- and afterlife of meter 187
dent in the poems of Robert Frost, Mina Loy, H.D., William Carlos Williams,
and even, perhaps especially, Yeats.
Eliot defines Pound’s metric according to an “adaptability of metre to
mood, an adaptability due to an intensive study of metre, that constitutes an
important element in Pound’s technique. Few readers were prepared to accept
or follow the amount of erudition [in Personae and Exultations] . . . or to de-
vote the care to reading them which they demand.”^10 Eliot then summarizes
Pound’s substantial “erudition” but concludes that the poems require “a
trained ear, or at least a willingness to be trained” (167). Eliot, writing in 1917,
seems to contextualize Pound’s metric in terms of an “English ear.” And yet
this definition and formation of a reading practice according to an “ear” was
conceived as a new critical model in the 1920s. “How to read meter” became a
question severed from English historicity and politics, cut from any lingering
association with metaphysics, and was transformed into a secular and ahistori-
cal reading practice. Pound, Eliot, and other poets of this formative Victorian-
Edwardian-Georgian moment, deserve reconsideration within the shifting
contexts of English philolog y and education that I present here, figured liter-
ally and allegorically in changing conceptions of metrical form in English.
Make It Old: Robert Bridges and Obsolescence
“As for the nineteenth century,” Pound writes in “A Retrospect,” “with all re-
spect for its achievements, I think we shall look back upon it as a rather blurry,
messy sort of period, a rather sentimentalistic, mannerish sort of period.” Until
Swinburne, Pound attempts to persuade us, “poetry had been merely the ve-
hicle . . . the ox-cart and post-chaise for transmitting thoughts poetic or other-
wise.”^11 Pound is emphasizing the newly mechanistic nature of modernist
rhythm, as opposed to the rural, agricultural, provincial meters of old that,
without a trace of acknowledgment as to why or how these rural, agricultural,
or provincial meters were otherwise conscripted into the service of a national
Anglo-Saxon past (working class, nativist, persistent, and steadfast).^12 We have
seen what Pound made of Robert Bridges, and his recasting of Bridges as a
“corpse of the null” has done its work to keep Bridges’s life and work hidden.
But what did Bridges make of Pound and the new generations of poets who
would prefer that the laureate fade away, back into the Victorian era where he
belonged? It is true that Bridges had always been associated with a kind of
“older” style; he looked backward toward Milton and to classical verse forms.
He published multilingual The Spirit of Man wartime antholog y when he was
eighty-four years old. But however slow his poetic output might have been in
later years, he continued to experiment and to perfect what he felt was a more
delicate form of free verse, all the while aware of and attempting to educate his
audiences about the histories and possibilities for accentual, syllabic, and