Changes in the conception of temporality and history in the final decades of the nineteenth century have been documented fascinatingly by scholars, notably Stephen Kern, who shows how inventions such as the telephone (1876), the electric light and the cinema, not to mention the introduction of standard time or Einstein's theory of special relativity, all altered the way time was experienced. Aestheticist poetry does not often refiect on such matters directly in content at any level of technological specificity. Yet metre is poetry's self-conscious awareness of its existence in time – it is what inscribes or maps poetry across time, and within time – and I suggest we might think about the broader history of the lyric genre and its key developments in metrical form as responsive to such changes. I suggest here that the very generic conventions of the lyric were brought into crisis by larger-scale theoretical shifts in the conception of time (that were, in turn, born out of many more specific events and technological innovations). Poetry had to respond to these larger-scale shifts, no matter what its concerns in content, because they shaped the very nature of the genre, both formally and theoretically.

So, my aim in Part I is to explore metrical responses to concerns about the relationship between lyric and modernity prior to the explicit attempt to ‘modernise’ poetic form through the use of free verse. The following two chapters will examine, particularly, responses to what I termed in my previous chapter a Romantic lyric dialectic between the transcendent and the earthly, exploring how it was negotiated in relation to the modern world towards the end of the century. I suggest that at the heart of what I trace in poetry of the period lie fundamental shifts in the conceptualisation of time that might be characterised through a development from Enlightenment to post-Enlightenment thought.