234 notes to chapter 4
- The Times, September 9, 1914. The “Masterman Group” was made up of
well-known figures from a group of poets put together by Wellington House, the
government propaganda office. Newbolt and Masterman encouraged the writ-
ers to compose occasional verses to boost national morale, as if to put the war sol-
idly within the historical context of England’s glorious literary heritage. Bridges,
Hardy, Chesterton, Hewlett, and Kipling were among the members, and their
poems were published as pamphlets and in The Times. [The contents: “Wake up,
England,” by Robert Bridges; “Song of the Soldiers” by Thomas Hardy; “For all we
Have and Are” by Rudyard Kipling : “For the Fallen” by Laurence Binyon; “The
Battle of the Bight” by William Watson; “Called Up” by Dudley Clark; “Gods of
War” by A. E.; “Into Battle” by Julian Grenfell; “The Trumpet” by Rabindranath
Tagore; “Resolve” by F. E. Maitland; “The Search-Lights” by Alfred Noyes; “The
King’s Highway” by Henry Newbolt; “Invocation” by Robert Nicols; “Happy En-
gland” by Walter de la Mare; “Expeditional” By C.W. Brodribb; and “August, 1914”
‘by the author of Charitessi” (Robert Bridges’s daughter Elizabeth Bridges, later
Daryush)]. - Clarke’s antholog y (A Treasury of War Poetry) also contained poems by Kipling :
“For All We Have and Are,” “The Choice,” “The Mine-Sweepers,” and Newbolt, “A
Letter from the Front,” “His Toy Band,” “The Vigil.” H. B. Elliott’s antholog y Lest We
Forget contained “The War Shadow” by Hardy but did not contain Kipling’s “Reces-
sional.” The Fiery Cross: An Antholog y of War Poems, edited by Mabel C. Edwards, and
Mary Booth, contained “The Farewell” by Newbolt and “The Knitting Song” and
“The Lads of the Maple Leaf ” by Jessie Pope. Poems of the Great War, edited by J. W.
Cunliffe, contained Pope’s poem “Socks” and Alice Meynell’s poem “Summer in En-
gland, 1914.” A more detailed analysis of these anthologies might produce an interest-
ing study of the kinds of sympathies they hoped to produce, or the kinds of print
communities the anthologies themselves formed. - Though I do not have time to explore or resituate Hardy’s poetics in this narra-
tive, his verses are famously difficult to scan. Indeed, when Herbert Tucker announced
his new teaching website, “For Better or Verse,” one of the first comments was a quib-
ble about the scansion of Hardy’s famous poem “The Voice.” Dennis Taylor’s excellent
work on Hardy needs twentieth-century counterparts, particularly the much ne-
glected war poems. Cf. Taylor, Hardy’s Literary Language and Victorian Philolog y;
Hardy’s Metres and Victorian Prosody. - Mrs. Hardy explains:
In the reception of this [Wessex Poems] and later volumes of Hardy’s poems there
was, he said, as regards form, the inevitable ascription to ignorance of what was
really choice after full knowledge. . . . He knew that in architecture cunning ir-
regularity is of enormous worth, and it is obvious that he carried on into his
verse . . . the principle of spontaneity . . . resulting in the “unforeseen” . . . charac-
ter of his metres and stanzas, that of stress rather than of syllable, poetic texture
rather than poetic veneer. . . . Among his papers were quantities of notes on
rhythm and metre. . . . These verse skeletons were mostly blank, and only desig-
nated by the usual marks for long and short syllables, accentuations, etc., but
they were occasionally made up of “nonsense verses” — such as, he said, were