Introduction: the failure of meter -- Modern instability -- Metrical communities -- Meter as culture -- A note on historical prosody -- The history of meter -- A metrical history of England -- A grammatical history of England -- Grammatical instability -- Metrical instability -- The stigma of meter -- Metrical irrelevance -- The British empire of letters -- Marking instress -- Acute stress in "The wreck of the Deutschland" -- Mistrusting the ear -- The institution of meter -- Metrical mastery -- Inventing the "Britannic" -- Dynamic reading -- Mastery for the masses -- The English ear -- A prosodic entity -- The discipline of meter -- Patriotic pedagogy -- Matthew Arnold's metrical intimacy -- Henry Newbolt's cultural metrics -- Private meters, public rhythms -- The sound of the drum -- The trauma of meter -- Wartime, poetics -- Sad death for a poet! -- Therapeutic measures -- Bent-double -- The kindred points of heaven and home -- The before- and afterlife of meter -- Metrical modernism -- Make it old : Robert Bridges and obsolescence -- Alice Meynell's "English metres" -- Toward a critical prosody.