Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Failure of Meter 1
Modern Instability 1
Metrical Communities 5
Meter as Culture 10
A Note on Historical Prosody 14
Chapter 1: The History of Meter 16
A Metrical History of England 16
A Grammatical History of England 33
Grammatical Instability 39
Metrical Instability 42
Chapter 2: The Stigma of Meter 48
Metrical Irrelevance 48
The British Empire of Letters 52
Marking Instress 54
Acute Stress in --The Wreck of the Deutschland-- 61
Mistrusting the Ear 67
Chapter 3: The Institution of Meter 79
Metrical Mastery 79
Inventing the Britannic 87
Dynamic Reading 91
Mastery for the Masses 94
The English Ear 99
A Prosodic Entity 102
Chapter 4: The Discipline of Meter 109
Patriotic Pedagogy 109
Matthew Arnold's Metrical Intimacy 112
Henry Newbolt's Cultural Metrics 122
Private Meters, Public Rhythms 130
The Sound of the Drum 139
Chapter 5: The Trauma of Meter 145
Wartime, Poetics 145
Sad Death for a Poet! 150
Therapeutic Measures 158
Bent-Double 171
The Kindred Points of Heaven and Home 176
Chapter 6: The Before- and Afterlife of Meter 181
Metrical Modernism 181
Make It Old: Robert Bridges and Obsolescence 187
Alice Meynell's "English Metres" 198
Toward a Critical Prosody 203
Notes 207
Works Cited 241
Index 261
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