notes to chapter 4 233
Part I. On the possible expression of ‘poetic’ Rhythm — demonstrating the
Greek position to be the one logical method. Part II. Enquiry into Greek theory.
Part III. Other methods in use. Part II exercises me much. I have come at last to
see my way to explain their behavior so as to reconcile all the various things said
about it by other writers. It is amazing to me to have to discover such things for
myself. They are not in any book that I have found yet (Stanford, Selected Letters,
424).In March 1903, he is stalling : “You say, ‘Certainly I am hoping for a paper on rhythm
from you.’ This rhythm affair will come in due time. I am getting on” (428).
- (Letter 416), 429.
- In an unintentional irony, Bridges’s letter to Newbolt on August 9, 1914 fore-
shadows the output of militaristic ballads that will result from the declaration of war:
“I am much too excited to write. . . . I agree with you that this had to come — that is
evident from William’s conduct — and that the circumstances are particularly favor-
able to us, almost ominously favorable. . . . I pray heaven that the Battle of the North
Sea, which will decide everything as far as one can guess probabilities, may be another
theme for your nautical Ballads” (649–50). - Newbolt, The Teaching of English in England, 86.
- Newbolt writes the history of linguistic change as one of conquest, in which
other languages have been “subdued” by some mysterious power of Englishness, so
that those languages that we might consider foreign are transformed into something
“native”—“become the native experience of men in our own race and culture”—though
clearly drawn from foreign influences. Newbolt performs a careful transformation, in
which the philological complexity of English (the river and its tributaries) becomes its
own stream (“sprung” naturally from English soil), “subduing” those traces that form
an inherent part of it in order to achieve an (artificial) native purity.
The report continues:
We believe that such an education based upon the English language and litera-
ture would have important social, as well as personal, results; it would have a
unifying tendency. Two causes, both accidental and conventional rather than
national, at present distinguish and divide one class from another in England.
The first is a marked difference in their modes of speech. . . . The English people
might learn as a whole to regard their own language, first with respect, and then
with a genuine feeling of pride and affection. More than any mere symbol it is
actually a part of England: to maltreat it or deliberately to debase it would be
seen to be an outrage. Such a feeling for our own native language would be
a bond of union between classes, and would beget the right kind of national
pride (21). - A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (1884–1928).
- Spurgeon, Poetry in the Light of War, 1.
- Esenwein and Roberts, The Art of Versification, 38.
- Songs and sonnets for England in wartime: being a collection of lyrics by vari-
ous authors inspired by the great war (v). - Esenwein and Roberts, The Art of Versification, 40.
- Jessie Pope, War Poems, 38.