206 chapter 6
other possible ways of reading both “poetry” and “verse,” of identifying “En-
glishness” within literary studies—was figured metrically, formally, in the early
twentieth century by the poets who Modernism has buried. It is up to us to
exhume these multitudinous metrical narratives so that we might further un-
derstand our own unstable relationship to poetic form and culture and to gen-
erate new ways of thinking about poetic form’s historical contingencies as well
as the contingencies of our own contemporary reading practices.