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The Institution of Meter

It has been said that our English rhythms are governed by accent; I, moreover,

believe this to be the sole principle that regulates them.

—Edwin Guest, A History of English Rhythms

What, then, is the upshot of the whole matter? This, for certain: that we have as yet

no established system of prosody.

—T. S. Omond, English Metrists

The reader will already have discovered that I am writing under a conviction that the

musical and metrical expression of emotion is an instinct, and not an artifice.

—Coventry Patmore, Essay on English Metrical Law

Metrical Mastery

Robert Bridges’s experimental and dynamic poetic forms (and his discussions
of these forms) were central to the changing perception of English meter from
the late Victorian to the postwar period. Bridges’s role in the prosody wars, in
particular, complicates the accepted narrative of the rise of free verse, and
shows how the consolidated concept of traditional meters was challenged not
only from the modernist avant-garde but also from poets who had been ex-
panding the concept of English meter throughout the late nineteenth century.
The dynamism of meter in English and Bridges’s deep commitment, not un-
like that of Ezra Pound’s, to mastering various English traditions and to creat-
ing an English verse form that could accommodate foreign languages is evi-
dent in his innovations in multiple metrical forms. Whereas Hopkins receives
most of the attention from scholars eager to find a “protomodernist” in the
late nineteenth century, in many ways Bridges, whose late career spanned the
heyday of high Modernism, has been overlooked as a poet whose experimental
approaches to English meter were in conversation with the experiments of the
avant-garde. But also important is the fact that Bridges was in conversation
with the institutions of the English school system. For Bridges, English meter
in its multiple forms was a mediating force to be mastered, a symbol of diffi-
culty overcome, and a changing yet traditional representative of an idea of