46 chapter 1
In the late twentieth century, Dennis Taylor brought attention to the ex-
plosion of scholarship about meter in the late nineteenth century; the remain-
der of this book explores the ways that the accelerated concerns of English
national culture intensified debates about English poetry at the turn of the
twentieth century. Due in part to Taylor’s work, scholars of nineteenth-
century poetry have paid much attention to the metrical theories of Coventry
Patmore, first published in the North British Review in 1857 as a review of
“English Metrical Critics,” and revised and reprinted as Prefatory Study on En-
glish Metrical Law in 1878 as an appendix to his volume of poems Amelia,
Tamerton Church Tower.^82 Patmore’s essay seems the harbinger of this explo-
sion of interest in metrical form in the late nineteenth century, reevaluating
the philosophical implications of and abstract models for English prosodic
form.^83 The conflicts over defining English meter are bound to the problems of
the development of English linguistic and literary study as a discipline, and
the desperation to provide rules for English meter is often powerfully allego-
rized, for poets and prosodists, as akin to providing rules for civilizing and
educating the unruly masses of the quickly developing welfare state. For poets
like Patmore and Gerard Manley Hopkins, however, metrical rules could also
provide powerful allegories for religious and moral order in a spiritual sense.
Though there are many ways to read the dynamic history of prosody and its
impact on poetics, the idea that the measure of the nation’s language could
somehow represent the measure of the nation’s greatness—and that in turn
could be related to the nation’s spiritual health—gained momentum in the
Victorian era. Philologist R. Chevenix Trench published On the Study of
Wo r d s in 1851 (nine years after the formation of the English Philological So-
ciety in 1842, which would eventually hire him as an editor of the New English
Dictionary). Both Guest’s History of English Rhythms and Trench’s On The
Study of Words were reprinted in 1882 (the former in a highly anticipated sec-
ond edition, edited by Cambridge philologist Walter Skeat, and the latter in
its nineteenth edition, attesting to the book’s popularity). Trench writes that
the English language contains “[a] faithful record of the good and of the
evil . . . in the minds and hearts of men. [It is] a moral barometer, which indi-
cates and permanently marks the rise or fall of a nation’s life. To study a peo-
ple’s language is to study them.”^84 Indeed, the rise and fall of the nation’s life—
through its language, literature, and its definitions of meter (and definitions of
itself in metrical and allegorical terms)—were issues at the forefront of the
national imagination in the formative period between 1860 and 1930. It is in
this climate that the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins experimented with sprung
rhythm (rivaled only by the long lines of Walt Whitman in nineteenth-
century poetic nation making ). Hopkins, Patmore, and Bridges, as the next
chapter argues, were participating in a much larger discourse about poetry and
national culture, the distances between poet and reader, citizen and country,
speaker and hearer, and the seen and unseen presence of Christ, readable both