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quantitative verse traditions in English. In his late-career poem, “Poor Poll,”
Bridges reveals his disappointment that his life-long pursuit to reveal the mul-
tiplicity of metrical forms, their historicity and possibility, is either too techni-
cal for the mass public or rather, too belated. That is, his understanding (just
as Pound’s) of English poetics relies on an education that is no longer possible
in the national school system, without an intimate knowledge of classical verse
forms.
Bridges published “Poor Poll” in 1923. Ostensibly a reference to John Skel-
ton’s 1521 poem, “Speke, Parrot,” which was also written at a time when the
ideologies of classical education were under debate, Bridges both commented
on the resurgent interest in Skelton and alternative verse forms as well as used
the platform of metrical experiment to address the deterioration of Western
civilization.^13 When it was first privately circulated, on a quarto sheet, he in-
cluded a preface as well as “metrical elucidations” to flaunt his accomplish-
ment and perhaps obfuscate the latent critique in the poem (this preface and
the metrical elucidations were not reprinted with the poem in Bridges’s life-
time or in any subsequent edition of his poems). After Milton, he decided to
use a twelve-syllable verse line; not only could all speech fit within that struc-
ture, but speech and metrical forms from most Western languages:
I saw . . . that all the old forms of 12 syllable verse, the Greek iambic,
the scazon, the French Alexandrine, etc., would be admitted on equal
terms. It was partly my wish for liberty to use various tongues that made
me address my first experiment to the parrot, but partly also my wish to
discover how a low setting of scene and diction would stand; because
one of the main limitations of English verse is that its accentual (dot
and go one) bumping is apt to make ordinary words ridiculous; and
since, on theory at least, there would be no decided enforced accent
in any place in this new metre, it seemed that it might possibly afford
escape from the limitations spoken of. And thus I wrote “Poor Poll”^14Readers of his collected verse would find the poem under the heading, “Neo-
Miltonic Syllabics,” (all in the twelve-syllable line) along with a few other
poems in the same style, but unless one were a prosodist who had followed
Bridges’s development through the appendices of Milton’s Prosody, or hap-
pened to be a colleague in the Society for Pure English, the common reader
would encounter a poem that referenced various meters but did not clearly
settle into a recognizable accentual-syllabic pattern. The poem is at once wel-
coming and repelling ; the “low setting of scene” is appropriate for a wide audi-
ence, but the multilingual references speak to a select few. Bridges’s poem
weighed in on the state of English and classical education; written in the same
year that Newbolt’s The Teaching of English in England was published (1921),
it expresses both joy and regret over the report’s conclusion that literature