232 notes to chapter 4
- “Vitae Lampada’s” refrain, “Play up and Play the Game,” was picked up by war
poetess Jessie Pope and is the reason behind most of the accusations of Newbolt’s jin-
goism. But Newbolt wanted to distance himself from the poem. In 1923 he laments,
after a lecture tour in Canada, that the poem became a “kind of a Frankenstein’s Mon-
ster that I created thirty years ago and now I find it falling on my neck at every street
corner! In vain do I explain what is poetry: they roar for ‘Play up’: they put it on their
flags and their war memorials and on their tombstones: it’s their National Anthem”
(Margaret Newbolt, The Later Life and Letters of Sir Henry Newbolt, 300). Newbolt’s
frustration in 1923 echoes the popular sentiment that poetry and verse are distinct
( Jackson, Poetry of Henry Newbolt, 52–53). - Newbolt, “The Future of English Verse,” 367.
- Newbolt is referring to the Reverend R. W. Evans, Treatise on Versification,
- Robert Wilson Evans also published Daily Hymns in 1860 and other religious
works. - Robert Bridges to Henry Newbolt, letter 334, May 1, 1900:
I am occupied today in revising my Milton’s Prosody for the Clarendon Press.
—It has sold out! The second edition is to have a long additional appendix on
‘stress-prosody and the English accentual Hexameter’—and the delegates have
consented to my proposal to print Stone’s treatise on ‘Classical Metres in En-
glish’ with my ‘Milton’s Prosody.’ Stone’s tract is revised for the purpose, and will
contain a full account of the true quantity of English syllables according to Latin
and Greek prosody. He thinks that classical meters could be written. I don’t
quite agree with him, but it is certainly a most important thing for people to
know about the true ‘longs and shorts’ on classical principles. I think that he is
almost finally right about them, and no one yet has written any sense on the
subject. The basis is of course phonetic, and some extraordinary results come
from its application. It is all common sense, and convincing though revolution-
ary. (Stanford, The Selected Letters of Robert Bridges, vol. 1., 368–69)
Bridges’s high opinion of Newbolt’s poetry was important for Newbolt’s confidence as
a young poet. From a 1915 letter, Newbolt reminisces:
One pleasure today has been a letter from Bridges, in his old style. He is at his
antholog y (The Spirit of Man), and has been going through my New and Old,
where he says he finds ‘a good many pieces that I should wish to include.’ And at
the end of the letter he says ‘Your patriotic poems give me great pleasure, reading
them again.’ When R.B. is pleasant one feels ‘There’s an opinion worth having!’
(Margaret Newbolt, Henry Newbolt, The Later Life and Letters of Henry New-
bolt, 203)And yet there are hints, as early as 1898, that Bridges finds some of the patriotic poems
tiring. He writes, on October 28, 1898: “I have been reading in your book off and on
since it came. I don’t think it fair to read all those things at once, because one insensi-
bly wears out one’s enthusiasm in any given direction, and these poems mostly call for
the same kind, and a good deal of it” (Stanford, Selected letters, 339). Indeed, Bridges
predicts that the public will be “worn out” by this kind of patriotic verse by the end of
the First World War.
- Bridges even outlines his phantom piece on rhythm: