The Rise and Fall of Meter

207

Notes

Introduction: The Failure of Meter

1. The records to which I refer here were destroyed in the Second World War and
   not the First World War.


2. Versification, according to its bibliographic record, was “a monthly magazine of
   measure and metre.” Only two issues are now listed in the online catalog and both are
   missing. In The Western Antiquary: Or, Devon and Cornwall notebook, vol. 11, the edi-
   tor records, “We have received several numbers of a little serial called ‘Versification,’
   edited by Alfred Nutting. Its chief feature is the publication of original poems by ama-
   teur authors, to which the editor appends critical notes as to the style and quality of
   compositions.” (“Current Literature,” The Western Antiquary, 30).


3. Bradbury and McFarlane, “The Name and Nature of Modernism,” 21.


4. Nadel, Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound, 26.


5. Cavitch, “Stephen Crane’s Refrain,” 33.


6. Beasley, Theorists of Modernist Poetry, 1.


7. Lewis, Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, 4, 3.


8. Herbert Read, in 1933, writes: “it is not so much a revolution, which implies a
   turning over, even a turning back, but rather a break-up, a devolution, some would say
   a dissolution. Its character is catastrophic” (Art Now, 58–59); C. S. Lewis, in 1954,
   writes: “I do not see how anyone can doubt that modern poetry is not only a greater
   novelty than any other ‘new poetry’ but new in a new way, almost a new dimension.”
   (De Descriptione Temporum: An Inaugural Lecture, 13).


9. Bradbury and McFarlane, Modernism, 21.


10. Cavitch writes: “the perpetuation of such liberation narratives is powerfully
    motivated, and deeply inscribed in our scholarship, our course syllabi, and our an-
    thologies and editions” (“Stephen Crane’s Refrain,” 33).


11. This literary historical narrative, I am arguing, is largely based on reactions to
    the poetry of the movements associated with the modernist avant-garde as well as re-
    views of these poems by the scholars now known as the “New Critics.” For “difficulty”
    in modern poetry, see Steiner, “On Difficulty,” 263–76; Christie, “A Recent History of
    Poetic Difficulty,” 539–64.


12. Pound, The Pisan Cantos.


13. Prins, “Nineteenth-Century Homers and the Hexameter Mania,” 229–56.


14. For recent exciting work in Victorian prosody, see Hughes et al., in the “Victo-
    rian Prosody” special issue of Victorian Poetry, edited by Meredith Martin and Yisrael
    Levin.


15. This patriotic narrative of curricular reform in the English education system was
    often figured as an issue that pertained only to the men who would grow up to become
    soldiers and, indeed, the masculine aspects of English rhythm’s march through time
    was certainly a trope that appeared again and again. But I want to signal that this nar-