the before- and afterlife of meter 199
education impact and play out in the metrical discourses of the period. From
Anna Letitia Barbauld’s support of the schoolroom-as-nation to the count-
less schoolmistresses who wrote metrical histories, grammar books, song-
books, and drills (from Jane Bourne to Veronica Vassey), to the slant-rhymes
of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to the experiments of the hundreds of “poet-
esses” (male or female) in the nineteenth century and the subsequent mod-
ernist reception, rejection, and repression of these experiments (like Christina
Rossetti’s “goblin metrics,” so expertly theorized by Anne Jamison in Poetics
en Passant), the gendering of meter—both English and classical, deserves
sustained study. Henry Newbolt learned a great deal about meter from Mary
Coleridge, and Coventry Patmore learned from Alice Meynell. The absence
of women as main characters in this study by no means indicates that women
were not participating in, creating, critiquing, and influencing metrical dis-
courses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yopie Prins’s work
in Victorian Sappho (Princeton, 1999) is foundational; Ladies’ Greek (2013)
will be as well. Work by Jason Rudy, Linda K. Hughes, Linda Peterson, Emma
Major, Ben Glaser, Carrie Preston, and Emily Harrington has begun to correct
these male-centric metrical narratives. Because few female poets, beyond Alice
Meynell and Adelaide Crapsey, published prosodic treatises or manuals, I have
left them out of this initial study, just as I have left out a good many male poets
who also wrote about meter (it was such a common practice that nearly every
poet wrote something about his or her metrical practice in a private letter at
some point). I hope that this book serves as a first step toward expanding our
understanding of metrical discourse to include all of the narratives of metrical
and national identity that have been suppressed by literary history. As a ges-
ture toward the work that needs to be done, and that will be done, in this area,
I want to close this book with another 1923 poem by a poet who participated
in the abstraction of meter as corporeally, natively English in complicated and
lasting ways. In the same year that Eliot published The Waste Land and Bridges
published “Poor Poll,” Alice Meynell published “The English Metres” in her
collected Poems. Wilfred Owen’s Poems, edited by Sassoon, had been pub-
lished in 1920 and reprinted in 1921, and Hopkins’s Poems, edited by Bridges,
had been receiving the rare baffled review since its appearance in 1918. Like
all of the poets I discuss in this project, Meynell meditates on metrical form
in the broader contexts of English national culture in her poems, “The Laws
of Verse” and “The English Metres.” These poems provide a suitable postscript
to a project in which many poets were concerned that the fate of the “English
metres” in the twentieth century would mean their erasure from the script of
literary history altogether.
Like Robert Bridges in Sonnet 21, and like Hopkins in “The Windhover,”
in Alice Meynell’s “The Laws of Verse,” she makes verse itself the bird, not a
poetic inspiration that will fill a form: