the before- and afterlife of meter 203
This reticence, born of a Victorian education that respected the misunder-
stood laws of verse; this freedom, from Edwardian education and the chang-
ing conceptions of poetic form (and Englishness in general); and this eager-
ness to change the law entirely, especially in the 1920s, are all products of
cultural change that affected the status of poetry in England. Like Bridges’s
elegiac turn in “Poor Poll,” Meynell’s “English Metres” is an ode to English
metrical freedom at the same time that it is an eleg y for those who will not
understand English meters in the way that Meynell has been deliberately,
nobly, luckily educated to understand them. As twenty-first-century critics,
we might prefer this eagerness; but we must understand that our critical in-
ability to read meter historically is a culturally produced phenomenon, one
that this book takes slow, deliberate steps to retrace.
Toward a Critical Prosody
In addition to recovering and recontextualizing poets whose projects seem to
fall outside of the received narrative of English literature’s formal evolution—
most importantly, reading metrical projects as part of a larger metrical dis-
course, not discarding formal poetics as merely “formal,” and understanding
that “form” meant different things to different poets at different moments—
historical prosody reveals how the history of our profession is intertwined
with the history of form. Our traditional approach to meter has been to as-
sume that it imposes “order” onto emotions and onto experience. But what if,
as I have shown, the allegory for “order” is destabilized to begin with? Maybe
the emotional and experiential elements of the poem are not bound to an
agreed-upon stability. The instability generated by multiple and competing
metrical discourses correlated with an unstable national culture in the nine-
teenth century, in particular. Poets may identify with certain forms at certain
moments and use and manipulate formal conventions, but a ballad written by
Wordsworth comments on those conventions differently, say, than a ballad
written as an imitation of a popular music hall song at the end of the nine-
teenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries or, indeed, differently than
the lyrics to a popular song on the radio today. Metrical forms circulate,
change, and accrue different meanings at different moments, and this is as
readable and important in our understanding of the formation of “poetry” as
a concept as the poems themselves.
If we accept that many of our contemporary associations with the word
“meter” became fixed in the nineteenth century, what other ways were educa-
tional and institutional discourses influencing the reception of poetry in the
twentieth century? What other assumptions might we call to question? This
book has started to bring to light many competing nineteenth-century pro-
sodic theories and, more importantly, to show what was at stake for the poets
and prosodists who attempted, and often failed, to institute these new and