80 chapter 3
English literature that challenged the sciences and displaced the classics as the
proper discipline of study for an English gentleman. Contrasting Bridges with
his influential competitor, George Saintsbury, reveals the contested landscape
of the Edwardian and Georgian prosody wars, which have been largely ig-
nored or suppressed in favor of the more convenient narrative of the rise of
free verse. The personal, institutional, and national stakes of these prosody
wars are clear in Bridges’s poems but, most especially, in the prosodic writing
of these two important, and generally overlooked, figures.
This chapter begins with a sustained look at the relationship between
Hopkins’s and Bridges’s approach to prosodic practice and, especially, poetic
mastery. I then turn to an examination of Bridges’s dynamic thinking about
En glish and classical prosody over the course of his long career, before arguing
that despite the multiple and competing theories with which Hopkins and
Bridges experimented, the prosodic work of historian and journalist Saints-
bury, whose career runs parallel to Bridges, necessarily simplifies the story of
English prosody for institutional and ideological reasons. Sainstbury’s promo-
tion and institutionalization of the foot-based system of scansion (a system
that made little or no sense to many practicing poets of the time) is just one
of the reasons that the meter of English poetry seemed as if it had one his-
tory and one overarching form to those poets devoted to rebelling against it.
It was, I suggest, less the meter itself and more the ideological associations
to which Saintsbury was committed that inspired many poets to think that
meter was inexorably associated with a certain kind of Englishness. In chapter
4, I continue along these lines, showing how the institutionalization of a dif-
ferently ideological, but still nationalistic, brand of Englishness was prevalent
in the state-funded school system and developed into a fetishizing of a native
English “beat.”
Bridges’s privileged classical education at Eton and Oxford influenced his
reception as a poet and critic. For instance, literary historian David Perkins
writes in 1976 that Bridges’s “emphasis on tradition, consciousness, and criti-
cisms as essential elements in the creative process were fostered more by the
classics than by current excitements,”^1 and a review in 1889 foreshadowed his
reception in the early twentieth century and beyond, naming his work (and
character) “austere, classical, precise, reticent.”^2 The term “classical” refers here
not only to his education but also to his careful approach to poetic process. It
is tempting to read Bridges as a static figure that provides both a traditional
and aristocratic backdrop against which the modernists outlined their own
distinctive art. Indeed, from Bridges’s Victorian education to his seemingly
detached wartime antholog y, The Spirit of Man (1916), we see a figure whose
public persona is committed to ideas of poetic and civic order, seemingly un-
touched by the poetic cultures of the 1910s. But Bridges’s attempts to reform
the way students studied English poetry and his frustration that he could not
affect change were deepened and redirected once he became poet laureate in