Meredith MARTIN. The Rise and Fall of Meter : Poetry and English National Culture, 1860 – 1930

Ben Glaser
Article publié le 23 juin 2018
Pour citer cet article : Ben Glaser , « Meredith MARTIN. The Rise and Fall of Meter : Poetry and English National Culture, 1860 – 1930  », Rhuthmos, 23 juin 2018 [en ligne]. https://www.rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article2231

This review was first published in Modern Language Quarterly : A Journal of Literary History, in Volume 74, Issue 3 | September 2013.



Meredith Martin. The Rise and Fall of Meter : Poetry and English National Culture,
1860 – 1930
. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2012. 274 pp.


At the turn of the twentieth century, Robert Bridges made newspaper headlines
with Milton’s Prosody for attempting to renovate England’s increasingly
simplified notions of meter by justifying the supposed inconsistencies in John
Milton’s verse. Bridges, Meredith Martin’s unlikely hero, was on the wrong
side of history after nearly two centuries in which the “cultural dream of a
nation intimately civilized by poetic form” narrowed English prosody to the
“simple poetic meters” of the nationalist “military metrical complex” (144).
Yet Martin now excavates over a century of public discourse about prosody,
the “nearly unexplored archives of the thousands of schoolmasters . . .
linguists, prosodists, and poets who weighed in on the question of English
meter” (45), to revive Bridges’s effort to historicize prosody as a “dynamic
cultural category and a generative discourse rather than a static, ahistorical
form” (14). Martin extends the study of prosody beyond formalism with
two seminal questions : “When poets were inventing or experimenting with
prosodic systems, with what else, in addition to the measure of the line, were
they wrestling ? Why was the question of English meter even a question ?”
(204). She answers that meter underpinned but also contested a nationalistic,
Arnoldian civilizing project, so that ultimately the discourse of meter
remained thoroughly riven by internal differences and skepticism. The crisis
of meter reveals a crisis in the national self-image.


Both this book and Martin’s work developing the Princeton Prosody
Archive, 1750 – 1923
open new horizons for historical poetics and prosody.
The field, led by Max Cavitch, Jason Hall, Anne Jamison, Yopie Prins, and
Jason Rudy, has focused largely on the diversity and broad cultural valences
of nineteenth-century meter ; Martin’s is at once the most historically capacious
work to date and the one that goes the farthest toward proving not only
the utility of a historically attuned prosody for the study of poetry but the
necessity of the field to both formalism and cultural studies.


The Rise and Fall of Meter uncovers both the “lost history of metrical
debate” and the active “suppression” of disagreement by twentieth-and
twenty-first-century criticism, beginning with the two-handed engine of
George Saintsbury’s monumental History of English Prosody and modernism
(1). Confronting the “Great Divide narrative,” which “assumes that prior to
the modernist break, meter had been a stable, constraining, and limiting
institution” (4), Martin locates persistent instability in practices of versification
subsequently stabilized by twentieth-century poets and critics. We learn in chapters on verse histories of England that English meter — the strained visual marks or “stigmas” in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sprung rhythm, the pedagogical disciplining of the English ear, and the mixed therapy and trauma of meter in World War I poetry — is the unfulfilled promise of national unity. Once we recognize how prosodists and poets turned to meter to “define, transform, or intervene in an aspect of national culture” (4), the diverse premodernist history of meter becomes legible (if never quite scannable).
Indeed, the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century study of versification
was, like the study of pronunciation, “so permeated” by the idea of
unified national identity as to become “illegible in its unity” (9).


Martin’s skepticism about prosodic description notwithstanding, her
book is at its best in close readings of poems whose metrical allusions,
permutations, and allegories have been critically bypassed. Chapter 5, on
wartime versification and meter’s therapeutic use at Craiglockhart Military
Hospital, is especially valuable because it provides a new context for both
lesser-known war poetry and canonical works like Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et
Decorum Est.” Therapy at Craiglockhart, both manifested and parodied in
the patients’ magazine, the Hydra (1917 – 18), promoted metrical composition
to help “manage . . . time” in the lives of traumatized soldiers (162).
Meter could promote recovery by reordering mental chaos and reintroducing
soldiers to the coordinated canon of English verse. Owen’s simultaneous
debt to and distrust of English meter become the central narrative of “Dulce
et Decorum Est.” The poem’s form mirrors its opening salvo, men and meter
“bent double” in two reflecting, intertwined sonnets. The second sonnet
largely recovers its “pacing” after the disrupted iambs of the first fourteen
lines, but Martin reads this as automatized footslog rather than salvation
via military discipline. The prosody speaks order where the speaker cannot,
marking in stresses a “bittersweet triumph of steady, controlled pacing”
that belies “anxiety about the way that pacing and time significantly prevent
the poem from ‘telling’ its own formal absurdities” and about the writer’s
own “inability to tell, pace, measure, or order experience” (175). The poem’s
famous “lie” — “dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori” — becomes the false
promise of meter or, rather, its mercurial success in effecting recovery while
remaining “a constant reminder of the tyrannies of historical order” (176).


Though any critic might scan Owen’s poem or note its metrical puns,
Martin makes viewing its metametrical meditation on wartime national culture
possible. She shows how form, circulating in specific historical contexts,
speaks both structurally and allegorically ; her work opens new paths for the
analysis of prosody in works published not only between 1860 and 1930 but
also during other periods. In particular, it exposes (together with Timothy
Steele’s Missing Measures) the largely unaccounted prosodic foundation of
early twentieth-century poetics, permitting us to resist the narrative of a modernist
“break” and encouraging us to recognize that, despite the “trauma”
of meter’s dissipation as a hegemonic cultural force, traditional yet complex
modes of versification persist well into the twentieth century. Following
John Timberman Newcomb’s Would Poetry Disappear ? and Peter Howarth’s British Poetry in the Age of Modernism, we might revisit the fin de siècle and
modernist moments to see how Stephen Crane, Thomas Hardy, and Robert
Frost tarried with seemingly antiquated forms that modernism could no
more reject than George Saintsbury could shore up. Martin’s method will
be equally useful for returning to previous literary epochs, particularly the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when lexicography, philology,
and numerous “metrical histories” of England began to bind discourses of
nationalism, colonialism, and poetics.


Inevitably, Martin remains vulnerable to those contingencies of scansion
that she so thoroughly investigates. Rejecting the historical drive toward
simplified prosodic systems, she finds in the “failure to achieve a definitive
reading” and the “struggle to instruct the reader” not a cause for lament but a
“heartening” basis for “the project of historical prosody” (205), yet her readings
cannot escape the contingency of scansion and performance. Despite
her exposition of localized, historical practices, Martin rarely conveys the
(admittedly unstable) grounds of her own scansion. To my ear, it is unusual
to claim that Ezra Pound’s famous “To break the pentameter, that was the
first heave” itself depends on pentameter (perhaps the five beats recall a
ghost of form, but surely not iambs). Why not cite his injunction to write “nót
in séquence òf a métronóme,” which parodies its own metronomic rigidity
(Pound 2004 : 83 – 90) ? This is a minor issue in an accomplished work, but it
remains a methodological dilemma for historical prosody and criticism more
generally. To what extent can we take into account the advances of linguistics
(especially generative metrics and phonology) and formalist criticism ? Can
the analysis of the circulation and production of prosodic forms be convincing
or pedagogically useful without naming (even ad hoc) principles of scansion ?
Can we develop a historicized version of the “poetics of repertoire” that
Simon Jarvis (2010) calls for ? In the final tally Martin’s readings do depend
on (and succeed because of) the locations of stress, the sudden appearance
and rupture of classical schemas, or recognizable metrical patterning.


In desiring even tentative principles of scansion, one becomes Martin’s
object. This is Bridges’s awkward position in his metametrical allegory “Poor
Poll.” In that poem, effectively illegible prior to her decipherment of allusions,
classical metrical schemas, and historical circumstances, Martin finds
an “elegy for the loss of a particular understanding of English meter and
national culture” (189). The poem, which at once embodies and parodies
Bridges’s pedagogical investment in “the multiplicity of metrical forms,”
remains “too technical for the mass public or . . . too belated,” given the
death of classically oriented schooling (188). This may be the present fate
of the past’s polymetrical bequest, but Martin’s work makes it possible for
prosodic form to recirculate, to allegorize, to speak both its historical contingency
and its twenty-first-century critical prospects.



Ben Glaser is assistant professor of English at Yale University. His work has appeared in Victorian Poetry and is forthcoming in PMLA and Papers in Language and Literature. His current book project, Modernism’s Metronome, studies modern poetry’s historical prosody and metrical vestiges. He is also coediting, with Jonathan Culler, a collection of essays tentatively titled Critical Rhythm.


References :


Jarvis, Simon. 2010. “For a Poetics of Verse.” PMLA 125, no. 4 : 931 – 35.


Pound, Ezra. 2004. “A Retrospect.” In Poetry in Theory : An Anthology, 1900 – 2000,
edited by Jon Cook, 83 – 90. Oxford : Blackwell.

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