In "The Modern Element in Literature," his inaugural lecture for the Poetry Chair at Oxford in 1857, the newly appointed Professor Matthew Arnold professed the importance of “literatures which in their day and for their own nation have adequately comprehended, have adequately represented, the spectacle before them.”As Arnold defined it, the modern element in all literature books, past or present, is the ability to take the measure of their own time, and thus to give a
comprehensive and adequate representation of the present "in their day and for their own nation." Even ancient literatures have this modern element, especially ancient Greek poetry, for “in the poetry of that age we have a literature commensurate with its epoch”. The question for Arnold was, how might English literature achieve such commensurability, in its own day and for its own nation? “Our present age has around it a copious and complex present, and behind it a copious and complex past,” according to Arnold, and “it exhibits to the individual man who contemplates it the spectacle of a vast multitude of facts awaiting and inviting his comprehension”. The individual man—say, Arnold— needs a general law to comprehend this complex temporality and give order to the multitude of mental impressions “which we feel in presence of an immense, moving, confused spectacle.” But what kind of law would this be?
A few years later Arnold turned to metrical law, again via the example of Greek literature. In the meters of Homer (whose epic poetry was composed in dactylic hexameter, a line running rapidly in six feet, mostly dactyls), he discerned a movement that might adequately represent and comprehend the multiplicity of the modern age. His lectures On Translating Homer, delivered at Oxford in 1860–61, prescribed hexameter not only for future translators of Homer but
also for the future of English poetry. “The hexameter, whether alone or with the pentameter, possesses a movement, an expression, which no metre hitherto in common use amongst us possesses, and which I am convinced English poetry, as our mental wants multiply, will not always be content to forego”. If, as Arnold implied, modernity was the demand for the right measure and if, as Arnold believed, England was a nation in need of measure, then perhaps, as Arnold hoped, hexameter would be a way to measure up to these modern times. Indeed English hexameter might even work to displace iambic pentameter with noniambic measures, and so invent a new national meter. Mediating between continuity and contemporaneity, between the complex past and the complex present, hexameter became Arnold's measure of, and for, the present time.
Arnold's turn to hexameter was controversial by definition, returning to ancient Greek versification yet also turning it into modern English verse. His three lectures provoked a wide range of reactions, inspiring some translators and infuriating others, prompting scholarly articles and critical parodies, and fanning the flames of Victorian hexameter debates. What kind of hexameter was Arnold prescribing for English poetry? Quantitative meter, measured by length of syllables, like the dactylic hexameter of Homer or the stately measures of Virgil? Accentual meter, numbered in stressed syllables, like the (too) popular hexameters of Longfellow? Some combination or modification of the two? How would the new English hexameter be written, and by whom? How would it be read, and by whom? And what would it sound like?
In response to skeptics, Arnold gave a fourth lecture to defend the idea of metrical translation, and to define his ideal of hexameter. In “Last Words,”delivered November 30, 1861, he explained how hexameter translations of Homer might work to improve current English hexameters, and train the English ear to hear new rhythms: “In the task of translation, the hexameter may gradually be made familiar to the ear of the English public; at the same time that there arises, out of all these efforts, an improved type of this rhythm”. Step by step, placing one foot before the other, English poetry would
gradually move toward a new and improved hexameter, conceived by Arnold and born through the labors of poets and translators. And this labor would not be in vain, according to Arnold, as it would give birth to the future of English poetry : “I am inclined to believe that all this travail will actually take place, because I believe that modern poetry is actually in want of such an instrument as the hexameter”.
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