Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and
trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the
history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an
old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and
inherently nontraditional field, "English meter" concerned issues of
personal and national identity, class, education, patriotism,
militarism, and the development of English literature as a discipline.
The Rise and Fall of Meter tells the unknown story of English meter
from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I.
Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics,
Meredith Martin shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways
Victorian England argued about its national identity. Gerard Manley
Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, and Robert Bridges used meter to negotiate
their relationship to England and the English language; George
Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold, and Henry Newbolt worried about the rise of
one metrical model among multiple competitors. The pressure to conform
to a stable model, however, produced reactionary misunderstandings of
English meter and the culture it stood for. This unstable relationship
to poetic form influenced the prose and poems of Robert Graves,
Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Alice
Meynell. A significant intervention in literary history, this book
argues that our contemporary understanding of the rise of modernist
poetic form was crucially bound to narratives of English national
culture.
