the before- and afterlife of meter 205
more deeply into the interiors of domestic spaces and concepts of gendered
poetics.^22 This book focuses on meter because meter is where we have stabi-
lized these concepts—twentieth-century poetic criticism has, largely, relied on
concepts of genre and form in order to narrate the nineteenth century as a foil
to the twentieth. The abstraction of meter, its lack of historical specificity in
mid-twentieth-century criticism, I argue, is due to these disorganized, multi-
ple, and competing narratives. It is this failure to achieve a definitive reading—
despite the desire to achieve it—that I find heartening about the project of
historical prosody. That is, even in a text as didactic as the prosody handbook
or an author’s notes on how to read a poem, I find the struggle to instruct the
reader, and the inherent acknowledgment that the metrical structure of the
poem will not successfully transfer across readers and across time, expressive of
the many ways English national identity—and stable “identity” in general—
was and is fundamentally in flux.^23
Rather than collapse the metrical history into a simple opposition of
Anglo-Saxon or classical ideologies, I have read these myths of origin as two of
many that come into play when poets approach metrical form. Beyond the
history of the language, the development of industrial culture, mechanization,
changes in musical culture, different approaches to the body, to performance,
to all kinds of systems and orders, played some role in a poet’s thinking about
poetic form. All of these influences—transatlantic and cross-channel poetics,
translations and foreign travel—might be important and generative consider-
ations for poets experimenting with English poetic form. That many poets
were attracted to a stable metrical system is clear, and their attempts to achieve
and define these systems and what those attempts teach us is the subject of this
study. But the very unfixed nature of many metrical conventions, on the one
hand, and the too-fixed nature of their abstract definitions that then inspired
a model for endless critical discourse, on the other hand—created anxiety for
poetry readers of every class and educational background. And this anxiety
about form still pervades the discipline of English literary studies, where “po-
etic form” appears as that last bastion of elite training, the one place where we
have a right to a “right” answer, the place where a poem’s meaning might be
explained, once and for all, with the help of a teacher trained in the system
that will demystify it. And yet, as I have been arguing, the very poets with
whom we have charged the responsibility of fixing these conventions and met-
rical systems doubted the sustainability of conventional forms, doubted their
security for the future of the English language and English culture. They knew,
or were beginning to realize, that many systems were possible for English verse
but the contingencies of pedagog y meant that these various possibilities—
those that would, perhaps, reveal the hybrid nature of the English language—
might create insecurity in the young student/subject, and so that is not how
we have been teaching English meter. And even this realization—that one
model would prevail and be called quintessentially “English” at the expense of