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Title: A pamphlet against anthologies
Author: Laura Riding
Robert Graves
Release date: October 14, 2026 [eBook #79781]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Jonathan Cape, 1928
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79781
Credits: @parchmentglow
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PAMPHLET AGAINST ANTHOLOGIES ***
A PAMPHLET AGAINST
ANTHOLOGIES
A distinction is drawn between the
legitimate anthology (of rare occurrence),
which is a portfolio of fugitive verses, and the
ever multiplying ‘popular anthology,’ a display
of stock poetical ‘beauties’ and conceits by
critical bagmen for a simple-minded public. An
analysis is made of numerous anthologies, ancient
and modern, and of favourite anthology lyrics.
Since so much modern poetry is written in the
shadow of the popular anthology, this book
covers a wider ground than its title at first
suggests.
A Pamphlet
AGAINST ANTHOLOGIES
by
LAURA RIDING
AND ROBERT GRAVES
JONATHAN CAPE
THIRTY BEDFORD SQUARE
LONDON
FIRST PUBLISHED MCMXXVIII
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
BUTLER & TANNER LTD
FROME
CONTENTS
FOREWORD Page 7
I THE TRUE ANTHOLOGY AND THE TRADE ANTHOLOGY 11
II ANTHOLOGIES AND THE BOOK MARKET 26
III THE ANTHOLOGIST IN OUR MIDST 50
IV THE POPULAR POEM AND THE POPULAR READER 67
V THE PERFECT MODERN LYRIC 88
VI ‘BEST POEMS’ 123
VII POETRY AND ANTHOLOGY LABELS 140
VIII ANTHOLOGIES AND THE LIVING POET 159
IX CONCLUSION 177
FOREWORD
At the beginning of a previous work, _A Survey of Modernist Poetry_,
we carefully described it as a word-by-word collaboration. We did this
because it was obvious to us that the vulgarity of a certain type of
English reviewer would be encouraged by the combined circumstances that
the first author was a woman and that the second was a man whose name
was perhaps better known to him than that of the first; and because we
were interested to see how far this vulgarity would persist in spite of
our statement.
We therefore take a statistical pleasure in listing the following
papers which succumbed, through their reviewers, to this vulgarity:
1. _The Glasgow Herald_, which in one notice referred to the book as
‘Mr. Graves’ book’; in another, thought it proper ‘to give predominance
to the male partner.’
2. _The South Wales Argus_, which also simplified the discussion by
referring to the book as ‘Mr. Graves’ book.’
3. _The Guardian_, the same.
4. _The Nottingham Journal_, which broke down after the formal opening
sentence.
5. _The Liverpool Post_, which, ‘to be chivalrous,’ decided that it
must ‘lay the blame on the masculine author.’
6. _The Gownsman_ (the Cambridge undergraduate paper), which displayed
a personal vulgarity possible only to adolescence and Cambridge united.
7. _The Oxford Magazine_, a donnish fortnightly, which, in contrast
with the more representative Oxford undergraduate weeklies, followed
the provincial example.
Shall we add, in anticipation of fresh statistical material, that this
is also a word-by-word collaboration?
THE AUTHORS.
Chapter I
THE TRUE ANTHOLOGY AND THE TRADE ANTHOLOGY
In every language and at all periods, loose poems or fragments of poems
are found that cannot be formally classified among the collected works
of any known author, or bound up with other anonymous material forming
an historical unit for which a legendary author has been invented;
or yet, because of their character and number, be given each the
distinction of separate publication. Popular ballads, unless forming
part of a single cycle, epigrams, epitaphs, squibs, stray lyrics and
even longer poems that have irretrievably lost author and date, may be
fittingly united in a volume of non-classifiable verse; and this is
always a legitimate use of the anthology.
The anthology of the days before cheap books were printed was justified
as a secure portfolio for short poems that might otherwise have
been lost: short poems in confederacy being as safe from loss as a
drama or epic equalling their combined length. When at the beginning
of the first century before Christ Meleager compiled his _Crown_
of epigrammatic verse as a gift for one Diocles, ‘weaving in the
lilies of Anyte, the scarlet gopher of Antipater, the narcissus of
Melanippides, the aromatic rush of Perseus, the young vine-branch of
Simonides,’ and so on, he was doing a service both to Diocles and
to the poems, which were fugitive pieces not obtainable at every
public library or copying-school. Further, this compilation was made
without prejudice to the longer poems by the authors represented in
the anthology, or by other authors, which Diocles might obtain in
manuscripts of formal length. Meleager added epigrams of his own to
the _Crown_, but none written by any contemporary except those of his
famous neighbour Antipater, and these probably for friendship’s sake
only; the poems of other contemporaries were left to their own fate.
The _Crown_ was an anthology in the sense that A. H. Bullen’s _Lyrics
from the Elizabethan Song Books_ is an anthology: it was a collection
of flowers, but from remote or not readily accessible gardens. But
Meleager was a poet exercising an independent personal taste, Bullen
a literary connoisseur. Although Diocles was informed at the end of
the ‘proem’ that the garland was not merely a personal gift to him but
a common gift to all lovers of poetry, this was rather a rhetorical
flourish than an acknowledgment of responsibility to a poetry-consuming
public, such as Bullen must have felt.
Diocles circulated the manuscript: it was copied and much admired. A
hundred years later one Philippus added to it and brought it up to
date, establishing it as a Classic, an authoritative collection of
short poems of a certain character. Where Meleager had sensibly used
a mere alphabetical arrangement of first lines, Philippus set the bad
example to posterity of arranging the poems in subject-categories. By
the time of the Antonines the use of anthologies seems to have been
widespread; for instance, in the grave of a legionary of that period,
in Egypt, a collection of regimental marching songs has been found.
In the reign of the Emperor Justinian appeared Agathias, with the
sinister surname ‘Scholasticus,’ the first thoroughgoing example of
what we may call the trade-anthologist. He made a collection of new
epigrams modelled on the revised _Crown_, now more than a Classic,
a required text-book: which signalled the end of the anthology as a
casual portfolio of poems. It began with a servile panegyric of the
Emperor, followed Philippus’ vicious system of classification and
included many contemporary exercises in the style of the early poems,
even pseudo-dedicatory epigrams to the long-superseded Greek Gods.
Agathias’ anthology became a popular reciter for use in the intervals
between the courses of banquets, and at the same time a ‘_Models for
Verse-writers_’; for Classical Greek was now a merely literary language
and any verse-writing for an occasion amatory, funerary or convivial
looked to the Anthology for authority.
Yet Philippus and even Agathias did not find it necessary to give an
appearance of ‘solidity’ to their collections by slipping in, say,
three or four nicely rounded incidents from the _Odyssey_ or _Iliad_,
a selected Homeric hymn, a seasonal excerpt from Hesiod, a messenger’s
speech of Æschylus’s, a neat piece of stichomythia from Sophocles, a
couple of Euripidean choruses, three odes of Pindar’s, major poems by
Sappho and Alcæus; perhaps also the ‘funeral speech of Pericles’ or a
purple patch from one of Demosthenes’ _Philippics_, with an editorial
comment: ‘Though written in prose this may also be accounted great
poetry.’ The anthology, though it had degenerated into a text-book of
occasional lyrics, had not yet turned into the second-hand clothes shop
of poetry.
What has been said about the Greek anthologies applies nearly enough to
the English ones. There have been portfolio anthologies of verse from
the beginning of English literature: such as ninth- and tenth-century
anthologies of charms and riddles, fourteenth-century anthologies of
carols and lyrics and the famous ‘Percy folio’ of ballads--all of
these, however, private manuscript collections not multiplied at the
copyist-schools: the trade anthology only developed with the advance
of printing. Tottel’s _Miscellany_ of 1557 has at first sight much
to recommend it. Tottel, a bookseller, collected the fugitive verses
of court-poets of the elder generation, most of them dead, which
might otherwise have been lost: they were poems which, written in the
then new Italianate style, had been intended merely for manuscript
circulation in the limited world of the travelled nobility. But the
_Miscellany_ went into eight editions in thirty years, its subscribers
being clearly the country relations and wealthy would-be neighbours
of this fashionable poetry-reading society; and then became a Classic
and a model for such later Elizabethan trade-anthologies as _England’s
Helicon_, first published in 1600, which claimed to be a standard
collection of contemporary lyrics, only a few of which, however,
had not appeared in the authors’ printed works. These ‘Galleries,’
‘Gardens,’ ‘Paradises’ and ‘Pageants,’ containing only poems in the
courtly convention, are comparable with Agathias’ collection: they
consisted of ‘occasional’ verse of an amatory and exhibitory kind for
people with social ambitions whose taste in verse stood in need of
education and refinement. A variation from these was the _Paradise
of Dainty Devices_, published in 1576, an anthology collected by a
printer named Disle, which traded not in the courtier-market but
in the morality-market. Love and Honour are replaced by graver and
more didactic themes--‘Think to Die,’ ‘Our Pleasures are Vanities,’
‘Promise is Debt’; it also included a set of pieces appropriate to
Holy Days, and a translation from St. Bernard of Morlaix. _Belvedere,
or the Garden of the Muses_, printed at the same time and by the
same publishers as _England’s Helicon_ is, to quote A. H. Bullen, ‘a
collection of scrappy poetical quotations seldom exceeding a couplet in
length,’ anticipating, though not effectively enough to do much harm,
the ‘Beauties’ of the late eighteenth century. But for the most part
the anthology of this period kept strictly to short complete poems of
the same general character: there were no lopped-off branches of the
_Faerie Queene_ smuggled in, no speeches from _Tamerlaine_, _Gorboduc_,
or the _Faithful Shepherdess_. Nor were Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate and
Skelton applied to for subsidies, or a section of popular balladry
added, with an apologetic:
‘Rude Rhymers though they be,
They boast a native wit:
And in these gorgeous gardens may
Like nimble footmen flit.’
Such omissions, however, were chiefly due to the up-to-dateness of
the anthologists, who prided themselves on their modernity, above
everything; a generation after the first publication of Tottel’s
_Miscellany_, which was a collection of real poems, the anthology was
fast becoming a mere fashion parade. The following lines introduced
Proctor’s _Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions_, 1578:
‘See, Gallants, see the Gallery of Delights
With buildings brave, imbost with various hue,
With dainties decked devised of various wights,
Which as time served unto proportion grew.
By studies toiled with phrases fine they fraught
This peerless piece filled full of pretty pith.’
The monotony of these collections led in the seventeenth century to the
publication of various anthologies of _Wit and Drollery_; they were
intended for the same reading public, which had, however, acquired
through the theatres a literary interest in low life and clowning.
Tottel’s _Miscellany_ and Meleager’s _Wreath_ both had the advantage
of being the first of their line: they thus contained no poem written
for an anthology public, since such a public could only be created
by their anthologies. Meleager’s excellence, however, is more than
an accident of date; he had no trade purposes and, moreover, a love
of the poem itself. Tottel, on the other hand, gets his title as the
father of the English Anthology (Dr. Johnson called him the Mæcenas
of the times) from an accident of date, not at all from the purity of
his interest. Indeed, his scandalous rewriting of many of the poems
that he included proves that but for this accident he would have been
only another worse Agathias. It was his eight editions that stimulated
anthology competition and created the eventual confusion between true
anthologies, that confine themselves to literary rescue-work or have
some excuse as works of criticism, or as private albums, and are not
numerous, and the all too numerous trade-anthologies that turn poetry
into an industrial packet-commodity.
A. H. Bullen’s _Lyrics from the Elizabethan Songbooks_ is a ready
example of a modern true-anthology, fully justified because the
song-books themselves are very hard to come at and the specimens
rescued are obviously representative. _Lyrics from the Elizabethan
Dramatists_ may also be included in this category, though the
dramatists are more accessible than the song-books and the lyric is
sometimes too closely related to the play to make its transplanting to
an anthology congruous. Another good example of the unexceptionable
collection is Professor Child’s _English and Scottish Ballads_, which
is accurate, definite and well-organized: it keeps within certain
carefully explained limits and, within these, arranges poems that not
only are otherwise inaccessible but gain by a collation of their widely
scattered variants.
Among the less ambitious volumes of the same class is a collection of
songs home-made in the trenches during the War and edited under the
title of _Sing-Songs of the War_ by a young airman, Flight-Lieutenant
Nettleship. Professor Lomax’s _Cowboy Songs and Frontier Ballads_ is
another worthy collection. But in general a great risk is undertaken
in anthologizing raw material of this kind, especially where it is in
ballad form, as in recent collections of hobo and negro songs: the
folk music accompanying such ballads is a temptation to formalize and
sentimentalize them for popular rendering. _Water Boy, Where are you
hiding?_ for example, one of the most tragic and humble plantation
songs, is now delivered from concert platforms with piano accompaniment
as a cultivated, ambitious darkey piece.
Indeed, any field where modifications in the original texts are
necessary for popular rendering, more specifically where definite
translations are necessary, should be avoided by anthologists. It
may be stated as a general rule that an anthology of translations,
whatever the merits of the translation, is unlikely to be justifiable
as an anthology. This would be true of translations from American
Indian poetry in anthology form, or, in fact, of translations from
any primitive poetry, where poetry is not an independent creative act
capable of being separated from its background, but part of a tribal
ritual in which it has a meaning foreign to the authorship-principle
of modern popular-anthology verse. The proper place for poetry of this
kind is in an appendix to an encyclopædia of ethnology. This does not
mean that such anthologies have not been made which are competent from
the literary point of view, as in the recent translations by Miss
Eda Lou Walton from the Navajo: but whatever their literary merits,
they involve a confusion of communal and individualistic poetry. This
confusion is marked in a volume like C. Elissa Sharply’s _Anthology
of Ancient Egyptian Poems_, which is part of a ‘Wisdom of the East’
series designed to promote good-will and understanding between East
and West--‘the old world of Thought and the new of Action.’ Such a
sweeping historical generalization about the East--and Egypt is not, of
course, the East--does not allow for literary differentiation; and we
are therefore not surprised to find bardic battle-pieces and personal
love-songs interspersed with ancient religious hymns and extracts from
the _Book of the Dead_. The same confusion is even present to a certain
degree in anthologies meant to invite wider scholastic research in the
original language, like Dr. Kuno Meyer’s _Ancient Irish Poetry_.
Modern anthologies of foreign poetry fall into two classes. They can
be either anthologies in which the incorporated material is left
untranslated, such as the _Oxford Books_ of German, French, Italian and
Portuguese Verse: in which case they merely imitate the vices of the
_Oxford Book of English Verse_, of which we shall treat later: or they
can be material both selected and translated by a single hand, such
as the Deutsch-Yarmolinski translations from the German and Russian:
in which case the incorporated material is even more deeply dyed than
usual in the anthologist’s vat and more unrecognizably recut in the
anthology fashion of the language into which it is translated. It is
significant that when a representative anthology of a foreign poetry is
to be compiled a current native anthology is almost never taken over
and translated, but an entirely new selection made of poems that do not
so much represent the poetry of the language from which they are taken
as the taste of the public for whose benefit they are translated. This
reveals a principle that governs not only translation-anthologies but
anthologies in general.
A distich recently found scrawled on the door of a flat in the London
suburbs suggests the casual nature of a true anthology piece:
‘Brother Tradesmen, do not weep!
They are not dead, they do but sleep.’
The signature was ‘Hawes’ Brothers’ Boy.’ There must be scores of
similar pieces waiting for a place in a portfolio: election lampoons,
parodies of popular advertisements, anticipatory epitaphs of public
figures, anonymous album verse, barrack-room ballads not by Mr.
Kipling, and so on. For example, the following epigram appeared in a
Base Camp magazine in France in May, 1915:
_On a Second Lieutenant whose Promotion was Slow._
‘O deem it pride, not lack of skill,
That will not let my sleeves increase.
The morning and the evening still
Have but one star apiece.’
Mr. Rostrevor’s recent anthology of _Modern Epigrams_ should, we feel,
have consisted solely of pieces of this character instead of the
studied literary compositions of Messrs. Belloc, Squire and others
which can readily be found among their Collected Poems. It would be
proper to include epigrams like:
‘Because the Duke of York is Duke of York
The Duke of York has shot a huge Rhinoceros,
Let’s hope the Prince of Wales will take a walk
In Africa and make the Empire talk
By shooting an enormous Hippopotamus,
And let us hope that Lord Lascelles
Will shoot all beasts from gryphons to gazelles
And show the world what sterling stuff we’ve got in us’--
which the author, a distinguished poet, has omitted from his _Satirical
Poems_ because of its fugitive character; or Tennyson’s summary of the
Rosebery-Rothschild wedding, composed for a wager and not to be found
in his Collected Poems:
‘Venus, Sea-froth’s child,
Playing “old gooseberry,”
Married Earl Rosebery
To Hannah de Rothschild’;
or the playful lines on Swift attributed to Pope:
‘Jonathan Swift
Had the gift
By fatherage,
Motherage,
Cousinage,
And by brotherage,
To come from Gutheridge.’
These have that fugitive character which makes them every one’s
concern but the writer’s. It is different from the character that real
poems get from being over-anthologized and from that of poems written
especially for the trade anthology. The modern fugitive epigram is
merely a manifestation of that folk-spirit which has been forced to
accommodate itself to the urbanization of wit.
One of the reasons for the growing scarcity of the true anthology is
that once a field has been covered well, as Child covered the popular
non-literary English and Scottish ballad, as W. Carew Hazlitt in his
four-volume _Early English Popular Poetry_ and his two-volume _Early
Popular Scotch Poetry_ covered the black-letter verse fabliau, as
Chappell covered the fields of early popular song in _his Popular
Music of the Olden Time_, and as Dr. Milton Percival has done for the
political ballads satirizing the administration of Sir Robert Walpole,
in his _Walpole Ballads_, there is nothing left to do but to cross
the t’s and dot the i’s of these extremely conscientious antiquarians
and look for remoter fields of research. But there are not enough
remote fields of research to go round, and the temptation to make a
popular and uncritical compôte of these scholarly collections is very
strong. And once the research spirit is in abeyance, the conscientious
observance of the original texts of fugitive pieces--a morality by
the way which first hardened only so late as 1822 with David Laing’s
_Select Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of Scotland_--is relaxed:
and in nine cases out of ten the reconstituted poems, instead of
recovering a clarity lost by the carelessness of the original scribe or
printer, are further mishandled.
Our definition then of the true anthology has fallen into two classes.
First, a strictly non-professional, non-purposive collection, such
as the poet’s or amateur’s scrap-book (the Commonplace Book kept by
Woodhouse, the friend of Keats, is a good example). The virtue of such
an anthology diminishes with the increase in the number of persons
for whom it is made; best if for only one, the private anthologist
himself, next best if for only two, as if Meleager had not intended
his _Crown_ to go further than Diocles, and so on, the bigger the
circle of readers, the worse, proportionately, the anthology. Second,
the rescue-anthology, the value of which is primarily historical, only
incidentally (and not necessarily) sympathetic. Such an anthology may
be textual in emphasis, as Hazlitt’s _Early English Popular Poetry_, or
historical, as a compendium of all the political verse of any obvious
period, for example the French Revolution. Its object whether textual
or historical will be to include as much material as possible, that
is, it is committed in this sense to be uncritical; as the first class
is also uncritical in the sense that it has only a personal standard.
There remains a possible third class of the true anthology--the
anthology that is criticism. But a book of criticism could be only
incidentally an anthology: an anthology implies a work of pure
collection and display. In a critical anthology a conflict is bound
to occur between the critical element and the anthologistic element.
And the pervasiveness of the popular anthology spirit will as a rule
defeat what real critical intentions the author may have had. Roughly
speaking, then, the true anthology is one that is in no way likely to
become a popular trade anthology, since the general reading public asks
from anthologies neither unauthorative examples of private taste, nor
historical material in the raw, nor criticism.
Chapter II
ANTHOLOGIES AND THE BOOK MARKET
Of all forms of the trade anthology, the anthology, that is, which
treats poetry as a commodity destined for instructional, narcotic,
patriotic, religious, humorous and other household uses, the modern
publisher’s anthology is the most offensive. It comes about something
in this fashion. A superstition has hung over from last century when
there was, indeed, a practical demand for poetry for household uses,
that no general publisher’s Spring or Autumn list is complete without
at least one volume under the heading of ‘_Poetry_.’ What it is does
not matter, so long as it does not run the firm into expense. And
the publisher knows well enough that poetry cannot pay its printer’s
bills except in the form of standard text-books, nursery verse and
anthologies. But poetry text-books, unlike scientific text-books, take
at least twenty-five years to go out of date. Their market is very
close, and made still closer by duplication of texts in America and
England, Palgrave’s _Golden Treasury of English Poetry_ serving as the
chief text-book in the secondary schools in both countries, and gems
from American poetry--from Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, Eugene Field
(with the addition of Mrs. Hemans and Tennyson, of course, on both
sides)--providing the chief material for the elementary primer in both.
The American market is somewhat more open than the English because of
fancy, up-to-the-minute literary courses in the American university
curriculum and the _From Whitman to Sandburg_ text-books compiled to
supply them; in England, recent poetry is considered too recent to be
made an advanced academic subject.[1] As for nursery verse, it must
appear in the publisher’s list under the heading _Juvenile_ if it is to
pay for itself. So _Poetry_ must again be represented by an anthology
this season, the publisher decides.
He runs over the possibilities in his mind. ‘_Flower Poems_? No,
that has been done often, illustrated and plain. _Animal Poems_? Two
animal anthologies already this year. _Poems of the Sea_? I might get
most of it from Mrs. Sharpe’s _Sea Music_ and slip in a few moderns.
But the Sea is going out of fashion since the Air came in; and there
is no Air-Poetry to take its place yet.[2] If I could only hit on
something like Mr. Hartog’s _The Kiss in Poetry_. Perhaps _The Life
of Christ, an Anthology_? One of the later Oxford books, I’m afraid.
_Child Poems_? _Lullabies_? _Drinking Songs_? _Songs of the Homeland_?
_Book of the Tree_? _Book of the Inn_?... Can it be that all poems
have been anthologized? Then we must dig up the suppressed ones....
Ah, an _Anthology of Suppressed Poems_! A quaint Christmas present for
the book-lover. About 200 pp. octavo in limp leather and with a short
introduction by
Mr. Squire } or Mr. Chesterton }
Mr. Morley } Mr. Mencken. }
Office Boy! Rush this through!’
These publisher’s anthologies take many grotesque forms. The
arrangement may be one of subject; or of period; or of verse-form, such
as _An Anthology of Sonnets_ and _A Treasury of Modern Triolets_; or
of locale, such as _Manchester Poets_ and _The Chicago Lyre_; or of
competitive anthology quality, _The Hundred Best Lyrics_, _The Best
Poems of Our Time_, and, latterly, _The Second Hundred Best Poems_. All
these collections are mere wanton re-arrangement of poetry that has its
proper place elsewhere, or nowhere at all; as wanton as if the British
Museum were suddenly to change its library system and classify its
books according to the colour of their bindings.
Such an anthology-making resembles the tricks that the Victorians used
to play with the Bible. They collected instances of the occurrence
of odd words such as ‘razor’ and ‘satyr’ and ‘dragon,’ and collated
curses and references to the End of the World, and compiled ‘Biblical
Flora’ collections and ‘Examples of God’s Mercy,’ and so passed
many a weary Sunday afternoon; until some thorough-going spoilsport
published a _Complete and Trustworthy Concordance_, and the game was
over; there were no surprises left. Then they gave it up and read
improving scientific books instead on their Sunday afternoons; and so
the period of Doubt began. Only the Old Couple remained undefeated. He
set himself to tabulate the number of ‘_Ands_’ in the Old Testament,
and persuaded her to count the ‘_Ands_’ in the New Testament. _And_
they got the answer _and_ each checked the other’s addition; _and_ then
they did the _Apocrypha_, book by book, but when they came to _Bel and
the Dragon_ he died _and_ she from a sense of Christian duty finished
_and_ the grand total, whatever it was, ended in the figures 666, which
she thought was unlucky; _and_ she was so glad when she checked it to
discover that she had overlooked two more marginal ‘_Ands_,’ which
made it quite all right. _And_ ... _But_ by this time Science has
invented so many new tabulating games that, though the _flowers_ and
the _kisses_ and the _animals_ and the _mysticism_ and the _patriotism_
and the _alcoholism_ have all been used up as far as 666 and beyond, a
whole new tabulating-system will soon have been evolved, and we shall
be having anthologies of _Vitamine E. Poems_, _Poems of Television_,
_Death-Ray Poems_, and so forth.
Among other ways, the publisher’s anthology has varied itself by
specializing in publics. In some cases the publisher even allows the
public to make its own collection; he, of course, always standing as
godfather. School anthologies, for instance, are chiefly compiled in
the class-room by and for schoolmasters who like poems that can be
readily parsed, recited, and ‘got up’ with historical notes, that are
idealistic in sentiment and that tell a story. Other random examples
of the anthology specializing in a public are Canon Langbridge’s
_Ballads of the Brave_, gallant poems for private reading by English
boys of the Mafeking tradition; and _The Open Road_ of Mr. E. V. Lucas
(verse with prose-insertions), a small book for the pocket to ease the
sentimental rambler on a walking tour when, shortly after the ninth
milestone, conversation breaks down between him and his companion. This
last, though accepted as a ‘modern classic,’ smells suspiciously of the
publisher’s seasonal happy thought, his _Bus-top Treasury_, his _Poems
for Convalescence_ and his _Business Girl’s Garland of Verse_.[3]
Even Dr. Bridges’ _Spirit of Man_ must be classed as a trade anthology,
if not as a publisher’s anthology. For though the gross commercial view
was probably absent from his mind, it was at any rate a public utility
volume compiled for a national occasion. It came out in the middle
of the War and was dedicated to ‘His Majesty the King, by His Poet
Laureate.’ The preface makes rather sad reading now, when it informs
us: ‘Prussia’s scheme for the destruction of her neighbours was, above
all question and debate, long laid and scientifically elaborated to the
smallest detail’; and when it suggests that Englishmen should ‘turn to
seek comfort in the contemplation of spiritual things ... happy even
in the death of our beloved who fell in the fight. They die nobly as
saints and heroes, with hearts and hands unstained by hatred or wrong,’
and that they should find ‘joy in the thought that our Country is
called of God to stand for the truth of man’s hope and that it has not
shrunk from the call.’ To support such sentiments, the ghosts of the
Elizabethans and the Romantic Revivalists are summoned to present their
usual verse-offerings; but because of the seriousness of the occasion,
the reader is asked ‘to bathe rather than fish in these waters.’
* * * * *
In 1777 the Martins of Edinburgh began to print a series of _The
Poets_. The London booksellers, alarmed at ‘the invasion of what we
call our Literary Property,’ and probably also influenced by the
prevailing encyclopedia movement, determined, with Dr. Johnson as
editor, ‘to print an elegant and accurate edition of all the English
Poets of reputation from Chaucer to the present time.’ Forty of the
most select booksellers met together, pooled their copyrights and got
on with the printing: but on a less ambitious plan than first intended,
for they decided that the English Poets began with Abraham Cowley.
However, in 1810, Chalmers’ edition added the earlier poets; and
English Literature was at last provided with a _Library_ or _Corpus_
of Poets. True, it printed Warner’s _Albion’s England_, Drayton’s
_Polyolbion_, Daniel’s _History of the Civil War_ at full length, yet
left out Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s dramas; it included Ambrose and J.
Philips, Watts, Dodsley, Tickell, Mickle, Smith, Jones and Sprat, yet
omitted Blake, Crashaw, Campion, Traherne, Vaughan, Marvell; it printed
almost all of Smart--except his _Song to David_. But it was a Corpus,
the best that the booksellers could command. The general public looked
with pride not unmixed with dismay on this new acquisition. It was
an impressive shelf-full, but was one really expected to read it all
through? If so, did one have to start at the beginning, go on till one
came to the end and then stop? The print too, they pleaded, was rather
small. So some charitable gentlemen, friends of the booksellers, came
to their help with further _Beauties of the Poets_ on the model of the
guides to previous less complete collections.
Shortly after the publication of Chalmers’ edition the great poetry
boom began. Not only were the Elder Poets securely indexed in Chalmers
crying out to have their ‘Beauties’ exhumed for contemporary curiosity,
but there were exciting Moderns, too--the handsome, wicked, heroic Lord
Byron, the romantic ‘Waverley’ Scott, clever Mr. Coleridge and shy Mr.
Wordsworth, and Mr. Leigh Hunt and young Mr. ... er ... Shelley (‘that
custody case, you know’) and dignified Mr. Samuel Rogers. ‘Let us
have “Modern Beauties” too.’ So they had them. Then the fashion arose
of putting ancient and recent side by side in manuscript albums, the
recent for pleasure, the ancient to counteract the pleasure--this was a
period with a growing conscience about pleasure.
The keeping of these private albums of poems that had made a particular
personal appeal to the reader, each poem copied out in the reader’s own
hand, began as a disinterested hobby; and indeed there are people who
still continue the custom with pure enough motives. But the tendency
to let the album lose its private character, by handing it about among
friends and allowing it to come into competition with other albums,
soon destroyed the integrity of album-making. The actual personal
appeal became confused with the fashionable appeal. Because there was a
sentimental cult for Chatterton, or because the elder critics agreed in
accepting Shenstone as one of the Masters, or because Mr. Lamb and Mr.
Hazlitt maintained that the Elizabethan Age, even without Shakespeare,
had been quite as important an age of poetry as the Augustan, the
private anthologist was so busy mechanically copying out page after
page of verse that he had no energy left for enjoying it.
Now, the private anthology which grows directly out of serious reading
can be valuable to its compiler. It resembles, at its best, creation.
A poem particularly chosen and copied down in the reader’s handwriting
becomes in a sense his own; it is the nearest that a person who is
not a poet can get to writing poetry. But a private anthology is only
permissible if it remains private. Mr. Robert Lynd, in introducing Sir
Algernon Methuen’s _Shakespeare to Hardy_ anthology, quotes ‘a young
poet of our own time’ as testifying warmly to the therapeutic value of
a good anthology for sick and disordered minds, and asks Sir Algernon
Methuen and every other good anthologist to ‘glow with pleasure at so
startling a tribute to their usefulness.’ But the possible medicinal
value of an anthology for sick and disordered minds lies solely in the
work which the sick and disordered mind does for itself if it compiles
this anthology. And though it is possible to imagine an ideal anthology
free of all the faults to which we are calling attention, it must
remain ideal. Even an honest private anthology loses most of its value
when published as a public anthology. The poems included have become
part of the anthologist and have lost their original context. This does
not harm the anthologist, but it makes him a bar between the readers
of the anthology and the poem and thus prevents a direct introduction
to the poem _by the poet himself_, who alone has the right to give
it. Mr. Walter De la Mare’s anthology _Come Hither_ is an extreme
case. The poems included are so honestly Mr. De la Mare’s favourite
poems that they seem a mere extension of the De la Mare atmosphere
backwards through English Poetry. A tyranny which no personality has a
right to exercise over the reader; Bryant and Whittier, though their
personalities were less fantastic, made typical poets’-anthologies
which were open to the same objections.
No matter, then, in what good faith a private anthology is made, it
becomes, when published, an organized theft of the signatures of the
original poets, for it is the whole intention of a private anthology
to make the included poems the anthologist’s own. Granted that the
publishing of private anthologies is permissible, which we dispute,
Dr. Bridges, in his _Spirit of Man_, was right in suppressing all
signatures to the contributory poems (which occur, however, in an
appendix). The alleged reason for their omission, and for the omission
of titles to the poems, is that the book has to be read in sequence (as
Dr. Bridges’ new composite epic, we understand) and that titles or
signatures ‘might distract attention and even overrule consideration.’
The greater the integrity of the private anthology, particularly when
the author is a well-known poet, the more dangerous is it when put on
the market: by its publication it appears to be an act of criticism
instead of a mere expression of taste. Taste is the judgment that an
individual makes of a thing according to its fitness in his private
scheme of life. Criticism is the judgment that an individual makes
of a thing according to its fitness to itself, its excellence as
compared with things like itself, regardless of its application to
his private scheme of life. With taste, a poem is good because it is
liked; with criticism, it is good because it is good. Now, it is not
objectionable for a person who has not sufficient originality to make
his own criticism to accept another’s; for criticism, unlike taste,
which is arbitrary opinion, can be tested. The criticism of one person
thus accepted can become another person’s taste. But for one person to
accept another’s taste deprives the former of self-respect. Our charge
against anthologies is, then, that they have robbed the poetry-reading
public of self-respect.
The poet as the private anthologist of his own work provides the
only instance in which a private anthology makes a legitimate public
anthology. Every single-man volume of verse is a selection of all the
poems that were written during the whole or some period of the poet’s
life. Even a full _Collected Edition_ does not contain all the poems he
ever committed to paper, let alone those fragmentary poems and versions
of poems that were rejected before they ever reached paper.
* * * * *
Of _Beauties of the Poets_ there were many collections between 1780
and 1880. Three useful examples are Jane’s _Beauties of the Poets_,
a late eighteenth-century collection; Campbell’s _Beauties of the
British Poets_, published in 1825; and William Elwell’s _The British
Lyre_, published in 1854. Of Jane’s anthology, which specialized in
eighteenth-century metronomic verse, we have found the following
oblique indictment, a paragraph from a letter to Southey by John Jones,
the Old Servant; who knew it only too well:
‘I soon engaged myself again, Sir, (in 1795) with an old gentleman
and his three nieces, whose names were Alexander, uncle and sisters
of the present Lord Chief Baron, and I had not been in the family
many months before, young as I was, I was made an upper Servant,
and as I received a little card-money at times I soon was able to
procure me some books, which I did by subscribing two or three
quarters to the library, and the ladies were very kind to me, and
often lent me others, and about this time, Sir, I bought the first
and almost the only book I was ever master of, which was called
Jane’s _Beauties_ and this I read over several times; but my
chief reading now was history, and I made some poetical attempts
but I kept copies of none of them excepting the epitaph on Molly
Mutton, an old woman very well known about the streets of Bath at
that time; but on some of my verses falling into the hands of the
ladies, they were much amused with them, and, I believe, expressed
regret that I had not been better educated. The housekeeper, Sir,
was very kind to me, and on my expressing sorrow at her departure
once when she was going to see her friends, she desired me to write
something extempore in which my regret might be more strongly
expressed, when in a few minutes I remember putting the following
lines into her hand:
“There something is, my Martha dear,
So amiable about thee,
The house is Heaven when thou art here,
But Hell to me without thee.”’
Jones’ other poetical attempts were graver and more didactic and show
how readily the anthology lends itself to the offices of a poetical
horn-book.
Campbell’s preface we must quote in full:
‘At no period of our history have we possessed such a galaxy of
varied talent evinced in the poetry of the age as at present:
and never with some few unfortunate exceptions has the vigorous
nerve and intellectual grasp of our bards while throwing “the
drapery of a moral imagination over our poor shivering nature”
been more subservient to the interests of religion, or tended
more effectually to promote the intellectual as well as the moral
happiness of the rising generation. We have therefore in the
present selection of the _Beauties of the British Poets_ given
to the productions of our living authors a longer space than is
usually allotted to them in works of this nature: yet not to the
exclusion of the writers of the olden time. For it has been our
aim to bring together all the principal pieces of acknowledged
merit and of intrinsic beauty which have undergone the test of the
severest criticism and examination and have received the stamp
of public approbation, together with many a charming anonymous
production snatched with cautious hand as it floated on the stream
of time towards the abyss of oblivion.
‘While seeking for Beauties we have been careful to ascertain that
no poison lurks beneath the flowers. Nothing has been admitted
which has a tendency to offend delicacy or injure morality, and we
have been as studious to select those passages which convey some
solid instruction as those that are merely addressed to the fancy.
Occasionally we have introduced a Critical Remark which we flatter
ourselves will be an acceptable addition.’
The promise of exciting modern work is not borne out by the index.
There is no Keats included, almost nothing of Shelley, less of
Coleridge, a little inferior Wordsworth, no Blake, of course. The
modern writers given most space are Byron, Burns, Rogers, Moore, James
Montgomery, Cowper. Not quite so much of Scott and Southey (copyright
difficulties?), but their portraits form the engraved frontispiece
to the two volumes. The longest poems are Pope’s _Rape of the Lock_,
Shenstone’s _Schoolmistress_, Thomson’s _Castle of Indolence_ and
Stillingfleet’s _Essay on Conversation_, which between them take up
at least a hundred pages. Shakespeare is represented by five little
stock extracts from the dramas, not a hundred lines in all; each
extract given a moral heading such as ‘Appearances are Deceptive,’ ‘The
Power of Music,’ ‘The Course of True Love.’ The eighteenth century
is strongly represented, and there is a great deal of conventional
‘Beauties of’ verse-writing in the direct eighteenth-century tradition,
of which this extract from Erasmus Darwin’s _Upas Tree_ is a charming
example. He is speaking of ‘Java’s Isle’:
‘No spicy nutmeg scents the vernal gales,
No towering plaintain shades the midday vales.
No refluent fin the unpeopled stream divides,
No revolant pinion cleaves the airy tides.
Nor handed moles, nor beakéd worms return
That mining pass th’ irremeable bourn.
Fierce in dread silence on the blasted heath
Fell UPAS sits, the Hydra-tree of Death.’
_The British Lyre_ has a readable preface. Note the increased
missionary moralistic tone, now at its full, but gradually wearing
off (unless in definitely religious or educational anthologies) as
the century advances, as the advance of democracy makes the reader’s
enjoyment the determining commercial factor in the making of books:
disguised in critical language as art-for-art’s-sake. Note also the
increased self-congratulation of the popular anthologist, tending more
and more to drive the poets themselves into obscurity:
‘Three years have now elapsed since this little work first excited
the attention of the Public, and if I may judge by the extensive
diffusion it has enjoyed during that period, I have every reason
to be satisfied with the appreciation of its readers. Filled with
feelings of gratitude for the most hearty welcome allotted to my
book, I consider it a delightful duty to express my thanks to its
numerous friends and at the same time inform them that in this new
edition I have endeavoured to improve the selection by inserting
several modern poems which on account of the richness of their
language, purity and beauty of their ideas, truly deserve the warm
admiration of all lovers of English poetry. I now again launch
_The British Lyre_ into the vortex of public opinion, hoping its
reception will prove as flattering to myself as in former times.
With regard to the arrangement of the poems I need only quote
a few remarks of a friend, who kindly wrote the preface to the
first edition: “The book is divided into three parts. The first
contains pieces relating to the works of God or (_sic_) the
phenomena of ‘Nature’ directing thought to all the lovely and
awful demonstrations of the power and wisdom of the Creator, as
described by the pen of poetic fancy. The second division relates
to Man himself, to ‘Home and Country,’ to ‘Social and Domestic
Affections’--and here all the elevated feelings of patriotism (N.B.
this was the date of the ‘Indian Mutiny’), all the happy scenes of
the heart are represented, while those deeper and sadder feelings,
inherent to the frailty of man, are not forgotten. But after the
praise of the beauties of Nature and the enjoyment of the high
hopes of life, the third part, ‘Devotion,’ leads us to God Himself,
shows us His Grace and Promises, our prospects of immortality, the
consolation of public worship and of domestic prayers. Thus the
author of this compilation will be found to have carried out the
good idea of giving a clear description of ‘Mankind’ by placing
his selections under three heads, the first ‘The Place of our
Existence,’ the second ‘Our Feelings and Actions during Life,’ and
the third ‘Our Exit from this World and Our Hopes for the Future’.”’
In the generation that has elapsed since our previous exhibit, a
great change has come over the Beauties. The eighteenth-century has
been almost entirely cut out. Pope only gets a twenty-line part.
Shenstone is dropped altogether. The Upas-Tree is forgotten. Byron,
Burns, Rogers, Southey, Moore, hold their own; but Montgomery, Cowper
and Scott are yielding pride of place to Wordsworth, Mrs. Hemans,
Howitt, Barry Cornwall and Henry Kirke White. Coleridge, Shelley and
Keats are very gradually creeping up. Tennyson, as Poet Laureate, has
established himself in about five pages. Shakespeare still moralizes
for a few lines each on ‘The Grandfather’s Death-bed,’ ‘Mercy,’
‘Flattery and Friendship.’ The existence of the Pre-Raphaelites is not
yet recognized. A few seventeenth-century poets are revived: Waller,
Marvell, Quarles, Vaughan, but each only in a short contribution.
There are no poems included of any size: though long poems are still
represented by proxy of their Beauties.
_The British Lyre_ is thus transitional to the _Golden Treasury_
of 1861, probably the first popular anthology in the modern sense
which settled the whole troublesome question of ‘Beauties’ and their
extraction by only claiming to be a ‘lyrical’ anthology: this with
satisfaction both to the compiler and his readers. The compiler was
saved the labour of going through the longer works of Chaucer, Pope,
Shakespeare, Cowper and company, and the readers were saved the duty of
‘looking up’ the context of each extract, and could content themselves
with a good resolution to read these longer works as a whole at some
(indefinite) future date. The _Golden Treasury_ was thus an improvement
on the _Beauties_ in that it did not contain clippings from long poems
which, becoming ‘star-passages,’ interrupt their rhythm by a false
accentuation. On the other hand, the _Beauties_ were preferable as
being plainly nothing more ambitious than introductions to the complete
works of the poets they included; while the _Golden Treasury_ was
complete in itself and could be used as a pocket Library of Poets and
become very popular as such because it was no moralistic, ranged with
greater freedom than its predecessors, and was at least ten years in
advance of the literary taste of any rival.
The editor of this ‘modern classic’ was Francis Palgrave, working
with two unnamed assistants; but he was guided in his selection
either directly or indirectly by the judgment of Tennyson. Indeed,
it was as much the influence of Tennyson through the _Golden
Treasury_ as the direct influence of his poems that gave the next two
generations a Tennysonian view of the progress of English poetry. The
_Golden Treasury_, with its later additions, has become the Dean of
Anthologies, its original liberalism ossified beyond recognition. Its
one serious rival in circulation, Professor Sir A. Quiller-Couch’s
_Oxford Book of English Verse_ (1900), admits its obligations; the
compiler ‘cannot and does not wish to erase the dye his mind took from
the _Golden Treasury_’ (‘dye’ is appropriate, suggesting Palgrave’s
anthological vat). The _Treasury_ is a usurping private anthology,
very conscientiously compiled, but all the more formidable for that.
For Palgrave was in private life not only an unsuccessful poet but
a successful educationalist (the first because of the second);
therefore well equipped to impose a personal taste (his own, guided by
Tennyson’s) as a critical canon on his public.
Palgrave, in the poetical style that marks the preface of practically
every anthology--for the anthologist, after months of laborious reading
of the works of others, likes to give his own pen a good airing, and
this is his only chance--boasts:
‘Chalmers’ vast collection with the whole works of all accessible
poets not contained in it and the best anthologies of different
periods have been twice (?) systematically read through: and it is
hence improbable that any omissions which may be regretted are due
to oversight.’
Recent anthologists compiling trade collections have so much respect
for Palgrave’s industry that they generally use the same list of
authors, merely varying it with alternative poems of the same character
as those that he (or Tennyson) selected.
The copying of anthologist from anthologist always suggests sheep
at a gap. Dr. Robert Bridges, after the compilation of one trade
anthology, _The Spirit of Man_, an act of genuine if misapplied
creation, was persuaded to make another, _The Chilswell Book of English
Verse_, which, though it altered the proportionate weight given to
the elder poets and included a few rather backward moderns, was only
a _Golden-Treasury-Oxford-Book-of-English-Verse_ in disguise. One
particular poem, John Clare’s ‘I am, but what I am who cares or knows?’
is the only Clare poem in the _Oxford Book of English Verse_ and the
only one that Dr. Bridges printed; one might pass this as a case of
great critics thinking alike, if it were not that Clare is far from
being a one-poem man, and that Doctor Bridges evidently did not consult
Edmund Blunden’s recent and authoritative collection of Clare’s poetry
in which the proper text of the poem is restored. The _Oxford Book of
English Verse_ version was one rewritten by the asylum doctor who had
charge of Clare’s affairs at the time he wrote it. Dr. Bridges, to
speak bluntly, borrowed and borrowed stupidly.
Against _The Chilswell Book of English Verse_ may be set Miss Naomi
Royde-Smith’s _A Private Anthology_ published about the same time. Miss
Royde-Smith, in her fear of producing something remotely suggesting
_The Golden Treasury_ or its stepchild, reacts so violently from the
obvious that her collection seems to be competing for a prize as _The
Most Individual Anthology_. For instance, she includes nothing of
Blake’s but his _Address to Tirzah_, and nothing of Siegfried Sassoon’s
but a very slight poem written in 1910, years before he began any
serious work. Miss Eleanor Brougham in her _Corne from Olde Fieldes_
does not become quite so idiosyncratic as Miss Royde-Smith, though she
introduces her anthology (of pre-eighteenth-century verse) with:
‘I am purposely excluding from this anthology many of the
masterpieces which have received the homage of a long succession of
generations. The poems printed here are mainly chosen from those
which have descended so plentifully upon us yet threaten through
neglect to disappear altogether.’
Much of her choice is fugitive verse proper to be included in an
anthology, particularly the early English carols in manuscript in the
Balliol College Library; but she finds it necessary to preserve from
oblivion pieces so well-known as Herbert’s ‘Sweet day, so cool, so
calm, so bright’; Sidney’s ‘With how sad steps, O Moon,’ Drayton’s
‘Since there’s no hope, come let us kiss and part,’ and Shirley’s
‘Glories of our Blood and State.’ Rochester is represented by a poem
really by Quarles, and Skelton is given only the usual commonplaces
from _The Garland of Laurell_.
And now Mr. T. Earle Welby publishes his _Silver Treasury of English
Lyrics_ in America where the _Golden Treasury_ is as much a law to
anthologists as in England: a case of international bi-metallism in
which America, trying to keep her place perhaps, provides the humbler
coinage. He admits Palgrave’s as the classic anthology and does not try
to compete but to supplement. His two tests are ‘Is this poem, in its
own sort, of rare excellence?’ and ‘Is it in Palgrave?’ But in avoiding
the Scylla of Palgrave, he sails dangerously near the Charybdis of
Quiller-Couch. It would have been impracticable to admit both as
classics, for the average reader cannot do with more than two standard
anthologies to give a hand to each.[4]
In outward appearance a change has begun to come over the popular
anthology in recent years, but this is only a change in journalistic
technique. Instead of weightiness we tend to get lively sophistication;
instead of gentlemanliness, a bland vulgarity; instead of confirmation
of established taste, new discoveries not much believed in by the
discoverer; instead of pompous flowery language--no, that remains in
the prefaces as pompous and flowery as ever. The books are handier
to the pocket, more dashing though more perishable in format. But as
with the brisking up of journalism, so with the anthologies: they
have improved themselves with regard to everything but the one thing
necessary, Poetry, as the newspapers with regard to everything but
Truth.
Chapter III
THE ANTHOLOGIST IN OUR MIDST
The ideal popular anthologist is one who concerns himself only
with supplying his public with what it wants. But, granted for the
argument’s sake that the popular anthology must be, this idiotic
single-mindedness is of the idiocy of genius. For who but an ideal
popular anthologist would attempt to say what the poetry-reading public
wants?
Does it want to know the sort of poems that were written at different
periods in the past or that are being written to-day? Does it want a
nodding acquaintance with all the poets, with or without a desire to
enlarge that acquaintance? Or a handy reference collection of best
poems as well as the nodding acquaintance? Does it want poems that
have already become stock-anthology pieces or will it prefer a less
conventional collection, an admitted Not-Quite-the-Real-Best? Or has it
no critical ideas of Best and Worst? And after this, what does it want
the poetry for? Does it go to poetry as it goes to religion; or as it
goes to sport; or how?
His decision on all this, because what the public’s interest in
poetry really is is an insoluble mystery, is bound to be a decision to
compromise and to adopt the universally acceptable lie: ‘As everybody
knows what really good poetry is at first sight, there is no need to
define it and no problem to be faced about what to include. Good poems,
the poems that every one likes and understands, never get stale, never
clash with each other and are always immediately recognized.’ The ideal
anthologist is a priest of Poetry to the people, ready to give them any
acceptable god. He must be free from prejudices of his own but have a
steady intuition of the sort of poems that other people will like from
year to year. He must, in fact, to be free from prejudice, actually
dislike poetry. He must be merely a barometer of fashion: if to-day
he compiles an authoritative anthology of ancient or contemporary or
mixed verse, he must be ready to recast it to-morrow. He will have to
be an expert in literary booms. He will have to know, for instance, the
exact upward popularity-curve of Donne, Marvell, Skelton, Blake, Clare
and others and the exact downward curve of Burns, Byron, Tennyson,
Browning, Swinburne, as revealed by an exhaustive historical chart
of previous booms and depressions in poets. He will speak with the
mock-confident voice of Frederick Harrison:
‘I protest that I am devoted to no school in particular; I condemn
no school, I reject none. I am for the school of all the great men.
I care for Wordsworth as well as for Byron, for Burns as well as
Shelley, for Boccaccio as well as for Milton, for Bunyan as well as
Rabelais, for Cervantes as much as for Dante, for Corneille as well
as for Shakespeare, for Goldsmith as well as Goethe. I stand by the
sentence of the world.’
Our anthologist will also have to appreciate the economy of
book-producing: he must pay copyright fees for his key-names if
necessary, but the bulk of his material must be either out of copyright
or to be had for the asking (in a crafty letter of request). And he
will not only be shrewd in the matter of fees; he will take every
possible step to prevent the living poet from knowing beforehand in
what company he is to find his poems; and will take care to send
him no proofs. In this respect all popular anthologists are ideal;
we have never yet heard of an anthology whose editor has sent round
his proposed introduction and a full list of the poems he intends
to include. This would be a tenderness on the poet’s behalf that no
anthologist with any respect for himself or his public would permit.
If the proudest poet were to complain that being put into a popular
anthology is like being taken blindfold into a crowded room and then
having the bandage removed when the doors are locked behind him, the
meanest anthologist would laugh in his face.[5]
If the poet went on to suggest that the dead poets had any rights
and should not be put in company of which they might be expected to
disapprove, the anthologist would think that the poet was joking.
Poetry, he would say, isn’t like money or a business or landed
property. The poet’s testamentary wishes, to be understood from his
work itself, have no force as soon as the short copyright period is
over. His poetry is public property because, of course, the poet always
writes as a public character and speaks to the universal heart of his
beloved fellow-man.
When dealing with the work of living poets our ideal anthologist may
well study Mr. Louis Untermeyer, the chief modern American anthologist;
who, as a retired business-man, is much more astute than his opposite
number in England, Mr. Squire, a harnessed literary critic. Mr. Squire
makes no concessions to modernist poetry; Mr. Untermeyer manages to
find at least one accidentally easy piece in even the most startling
innovators if sufficient pressure from the most advanced section of
his public is applied to him. Mr. Untermeyer’s political tactics in
his _Modern American Poetry_ have been condemned by superior literary
critics; but he is really doing his best to be an ideal anthologist,
at a great sacrifice, probably, to his taste. With each new edition
the emphasis of his choice shifts: in the latest, for instance, he has
at last consented to admit the popular importance of T. S. Eliot and
E. E. Cummings. It is doubtful whether the superior critic, if he set
about making an anthology, could do any better than Mr. Untermeyer.
As he would be bound not to make way before popular success, he would
have to compose his anthology high-mindedly of born failures. But
even Mr. Untermeyer is not ideal, in spite of his readiness to please
every one. For we cannot regard his criticism, which is in the main
a register of the opinions of others, as entirely free from personal
indulgencies. For instance, he might get few people to agree that Mr.
Louis Untermeyer, the poet, should be allotted nearly fifteen pages of
the book, which puts him into the same rank with notables like Robert
Frost, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg and Edwin Arlington Robinson. Nor
might every one agree that Jean Starr Untermeyer should be given the
same poem-space as Emily Dickinson, even though this is only half Mr.
Untermeyer’s ration. Perhaps, too, the ideal anthologist would avoid
all detailed prose criticism like Mr. Untermeyer’s where a simple
speculative act of taste on the public’s behalf would do: it would save
a good deal of rewriting in the next edition if E. E. Cummings’ stock,
say, were to go up and Edwin Arlington Robinson’s to fall again.
Among other qualities, the anthologist should have the power of
recognizing a valuable old poem, obscured by a dingy setting, with
all the acumen of a furniture dealer, and know how to present it
properly. He should not be afraid to lop, combine, revise, retitle,
respell and repunctuate; and, if there are two versions of a poem, to
give the most poetical and suppress the most poetic. Random examples
of such popularizing methods are already so numerous that he would
not be wanting in encouragement. Barnes’ _Woak Hill_, for instance,
has been so frequently anthologized in seven stanzas that few of the
general public are aware that it has three other stanzas at the end
which the poet thought necessary to the poem but which are always
omitted. The painful first verse of Lamb’s _The Old Familiar Faces_
is very seldom given; the _Oxford Book of English Verse_ protects us
from the too poetic latter half of Donne’s _Ecstasy_. The case of the
O’Shaughnessy _Ode_ should encourage him in philanthropy towards the
poet as well as towards the public. ‘Palgrave recognizing,’ to quote
a modern anthologist, ‘the great difference between the first three
inspired stanzas of Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s _Ode_ and the others, calmly
and courageously dropped the final four.’ William Alexander Percy
performed many similar services for this singer and, as he says, ‘in
O’Shaughnessy’s case, it is the only way to save him from himself and
for posterity.’ A fine bold example of unauthorized revision will be
found in Mr. J. C. Squire’s _Selections from Modern Poets_, where no
less than five separate lyrics by Frank Prewett have been run together
as a single poem without, as we are informed, the author’s consent.
Retitling is common. We find Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch retitling Wyatt’s
poem which appears in Tottel as _The Lover Showeth how he is Forsaken
of Such as he sometime Enjoyed_ as _Vixi Puellis nuper Idoneus_. This
reference to Horace successfully keeps down the passion of the poem,
too strong for an ideal anthology, to the commonplaces of which Horace
is the Poet Laureate. And the poem as it appears under this title also
gives an instance of how an anthologist prefers the most poetical to
the most poetic version of a poem. The _Oxford Book of English Verse_
rejects the following as the last stanza:
‘It was no dream; for I lay broad awaking:
But all is turned thorough my gentleness,
Into a strangë fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodnéss
And she also to use new fangleness.
But since that I so kindly am servéd
I would fain know what she hath déservéd’--
in favour of
‘It was no dream; for I lay broad awaking:
But all is _turn’d now, through_ my gentleness
Into a _bitter_ fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodnéss;
And she also to use new-fangleness.
But since that I _unkindly so_ am servèd,
_“How like you this?”--what hath she now deservèd?_’
We conclude that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch went to Chalmers’ _English
Poets_ first, following the example of Palgrave, his master, and
found the version as he now presents it, though with the original
title. Without digging further for the moment into the origin of this
version, which is not Wyatt’s own, let us see what necessitated it.
It was evidently rewritten for a popular audience which could not be
troubled with the archaic ‘thorough’ for ‘through,’ nor the ‘strangë’
for ‘strange,’ nor the inverted accentuation of ‘servéd’ and of
‘déservéd,’ nor the satiric use of ‘kindly.’ ‘How like you this’ is
patched in from a previous stanza to fill out the last line which, to a
popular audience unable to appreciate its satiric meditative slowness,
would read feebly enough. ‘I would fain know’ is probably regarded as
padding, whereas it is the continued indignation of ‘so kindly.’ Sir
Arthur was wise in giving the public what it could understand; as it
was unlikely that anyone would go back behind Chalmers, no indication
was given in the anthology that the text was not Wyatt’s original.
As a matter of fact, Chalmers, Palgrave and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
have a common source: Tottel. Apparently between the writing of the
poem about the year 1536 and its printing in 1557 some hand, possibly
Tottel’s own, made these changes. So Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in this
case at least, is the ideal anthologist again, copying from the ideal
anthologist; instead of getting the vexatious manuscript reading from
Doctor Nott’s edition long ago published from the Harrington MSS.
Respelling is a matter of less importance; even the poet himself will
sometimes allow the printer to have his way in matters of correct
usage. But to do with William Barnes, say, what certain anthologists
have done with him, to transform his fantastically printed Dorsetshire
dialect into educated English, is a service which our hero, however,
will not hesitate to undertake. Examples of daring repunctuation are
particularly common in anthologized versions of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
We have commented fully on the treatment of _Th’expence of Spirit in a
waste of shame_, in another work.[6]
A further quality necessary in a popular anthologist will be an almost
morbid modesty. He must be able to bring a blush to his own cheeks by
the very thought of all the indecencies and blasphemies he has come
upon in his rambles: he must be as tender of the virgin-mind of his
putative public as an old-fashioned mother of her daughter’s, or a
new-fashioned daughter of her mother’s. And to this modesty we must add
a great gift for stupidity in face of any difficult passage in a poem.
At the first glimmer of any possible obscurity he must shut his eyes
tight and pass on in search of something easier.
Who are the present popular anthologists? They fall into five common
occupational categories:
1. Irresponsible enthusiasts acting often in the name of a cause.
2. ‘Minor poets,’ disguised sometimes as college professors, who
wish to bully the public into accepting them as major poets through
the leverage of their anthologies.
3. Professional critics who have easy access to the contributory
volumes and are on good enough terms with publishers and poets to
get copyright matter cheap.
4. The publishers themselves.
5. Poets with a reputation which the publishers are anxious to help
them capitalize as an offset against the comparatively poor returns
their individual volumes of poetry usually bring in.
Do they in the main fall far short of the ideal possibilities of their
task?
Let us observe the popular anthologist in action. He must first settle
upon a time and space limit. Let us suppose that he has chosen a grand
panoramic view from the earliest beginnings, e.g. ‘From Beowulf to
Binyon,’ but that his space is limited to the five-shilling or one
dollar-twenty-five cents octavo in stiff boards. He is to provide ‘the
best’--that is, representative poems by the most desirable authors;
to whom he will allot page-space according to their contemporary
standing. Since Fitzgerald with _Omar Khayyam_ and Coleridge with the
_Ancient Mariner_ are not all that much better than Landor’s usual
short contribution of _Rose Aylmer_, _Ianthe_ and _I strove with none_,
or than John Fletcher’s of _Oh fair sweet face_, _Hence all you vain
delights_, and _Man is his own star_, it will be necessary for him to
cut _Omar Khayyam_ as it has been cut in the _Oxford Book of English
Verse_, and to omit _The Ancient Mariner_ in favour of two unimportant
Coleridge items, as the _Golden Treasury_ has done (under the pretext
that it is less ‘lyrical’ than _Omar Khayyam_, which is given in full
on account of Tennyson’s extravagant estimate of Fitzgerald as a poet).
The anthologist, then, decides, on his page-limit, chooses his list
of authors according to an imaginary popularity vote and allots his
page-space in descending order of generosity. Shakespeare fifteen
pages, Keats fourteen, Milton thirteen-and-a-half, Wordsworth the
same, down to Southey, Poe, Samuel Rogers and Laurence Binyon one-half
apiece. Next he will draw up a list of subjects from which to choose
his poems, such as:
Triumphant Love.
Renunciation in Love.
Christian Mystic Love.
A Hunting Song.
Farm House Life.
A Sea Piece.
A Spring Piece.
A Garden Piece.
Remembrance of Childhood.
Grief for Departed Friends.
A Pastoral.
A Poem about a Train.
A Poem about England, and/or
A Poem about the Stars and Stripes.
A Battle Piece.
A Poem about a Dead Child.
An Irish Piece.
Miscellaneous.
In choosing these poems he will look for the following proportion as
given in the old punch-brewing recipe:
‘One of sour,
Two of sweet,
Four of strong,
And eight of weak.’
He must go a little further afield than his predecessors, but not too
far afield. Though he must not use too much of the material of the two
established anthologies--the _Golden Treasury_ and the _Oxford Book
of English Verse_--the same list of authors must be fairly closely
observed, and the same type of poem. For instance, the _Intimations of
Immortality_ may as a subject be allotted to Henry Vaughan’s _Retreat_,
as Sir Algernon Methuen has done, while not robbing Wordsworth of
page-space. Or, a poem other than _The Old Familiar Faces_ may be
found to put over Lamb’s signature, and ‘grief for departed friends’
as a subject may be allotted to Siegfried Sassoon’s _Twelve Months
After_. The new page-length importance of Rupert Brooke being realized,
the poem about the Glorious Dead may be allotted to him instead of
to Campbell or Collins; and his _Grantchester_ may take the place
of Browning’s _Home Thoughts from Abroad_. The farmhouse piece may
similarly be entrusted to Edmund Blunden or Robert Frost instead of to
Crabbe or Samuel Rogers.
Since there are two divisions of the public to gratify, the public
that wants pleasure and the public that wants literary small-talk, the
arrangement had better be for pleasure, with the literary references
tucked away in a small-print appendix. There must be an index of first
lines and one of authors’ names; and a list of acknowledgments to
publishers. The rest of the anthologizing may safely be left to the
printers and binders. The title must be the battle already half-won.
So Mr. Adam Gowans prefaces his _The Hundred Best Poems (Lyrical)_
with: ‘Let me frankly admit, to begin with, that the attractiveness and
probable selling qualities of the title of this little book proved,
when it had once been thought of, too powerful arguments in its favour
for it to be abandoned.’
This preface, as it happens, provides a ready model for our anthologist
to imitate: ‘I am fully conscious of the presumption such a title
implies in an unknown selector, but at the same time I submit.... I
can assert without fear of contradiction that every one of the poems
I have included is a “gem of purest ray serene,” that none can be too
often read or too often repeated to one’s self.... In conclusion my
very warmest thanks are due to Messrs. Macmillan & Co. for permission
... to Messrs. Smith Elder & Co. for a like privilege ... _also to the
following gentlemen_ ...’
The best introductory preface would be one anthologized from all the
anthology prefaces. As follows:
‘Poetry is the light that never was on sea or land, and the homely
glow in the cottage window; the star in the sky and the fire on the
hearth; the careless laughter of children and the dreams of the man
of business; the glare of the footlights and the sacred flame of
the altar; the jewels of the privileged few and the common coinage
that everybody handles ...’
_The Bookman Treasury of Living Poets._
‘All the Gems in this volume are not of equal brilliancy: the
diamonds, rubies, emeralds and pearls of literature are few;--but
there are other gems than these, of inferior value but still
gem-like;--agate, cornelian, amethyst, turquoise, onyx and scores
of others known to the lapidary and jeweller and prized by them and
by the public to whose appreciation they are offered.’
_One Thousand and One Gems._
‘Nor have I sought in these Islands only, but wheresoever the Muse
has followed the tongue that among living tongues she most delights
to honour.’
_The Oxford Book of English Verse._
‘The poet touches life at every point; he paints all phases of
human existence and in moments of exaltation he mounts to ideal
regions and sees ... the heavens opened and the angels of God
ascending and descending. To such a vision the common man is not
wholly blind. He knows without seeming to know what is beautiful
and true.’
_From Shakespeare to Hardy._
‘Like the fabled fountain of the Azores, but with a more various
power, the magic of this Art can confer on each period of life its
appropriate blessing: on early years, Experience; on maturity,
Calm; on age, Youthfulness....’
_Golden Treasury._
‘But there is no arbitrary isolation of one theme from another;
they mingle and interpenetrate throughout, to the music of Pan’s
flute, and of Love’s viol, and the bugle-call of Endeavour and the
passing-bell of Death....’
_Poems of To-day._
At this point we might stumble on such contradictions as this:
‘Every poet writes for the general public or he would not complain
when it neglects him, and the greater poets sooner or later make
the wider appeal.’
_Mr. St. John Adcock._
and
‘Poetry is the most private of the arts, the art of the man who can
live independently of the crowd.’
_Mr. Robert Lynd._
But our ideal anthologist would undoubtedly be able to harmonize them
somehow.
Perhaps most of all the anthologist must remember that his public loves
personalities. A poet’s self-portrait will always be welcome. Keats
must be presented standing tip-toe up on his little hill; Mr. Yeats
standing smothered o’wit on the Dublin pavement deliberating a journey
to Inisfree; Gray as little Tommy Stout pulling poor pussy sadly out
of the water; Milton making decent clutches at his late espousèd Saint
(not the one he was so angered at not being able to divorce); Burns
interrupting the ploughing of his crooked furrow to address maudlin
apologies to the daisies and mice he was disturbing; Shakespeare as
Romeo.
In fact, we may conclude that most present-day popular anthologies and
anthologists are, after all, not so very far from what they should be.
_If_ they should be.
Chapter IV
THE POPULAR POEM AND THE POPULAR READER
The aim of the popular anthologist is to make a single book out of
clippings from many books; to create a composite author who shall be a
mean struck between all the poets included. But to strike a mean even,
for instance, between Burns, Rogers, Tennyson and Clough, with only
a century separating the first and last, is plainly impossible. The
result is the choice of a negative type of poem not proper to any of
the poets, that is, not the sort of poem that either Burns and Clough
must have written, but one that neither of them need have written.
The intelligent but unread reader who wishes to find out what poets
he would like to know better gets no help from the popular anthology:
in an anthology everything reads democratically much the same. We
would not go so far as to say that every poem in _The Golden Treasury_
is uncharacteristic of the author, but we do say that even positive
poems lose character by being anthologized. Poems by Shakespeare,
Donne, Shelley, Keats, become affected by the same negative poison,
to a point where they are almost unrecognizable; so faces in the
Underground or Overhead railways are made negative, as faces, by the
spell of the cheap ticket which is the only link between them. In place
of their original quality the good poems acquire the same meaningless
competitive vulgarity as the bad: a conversation between various
anthology favourites would read something like this:
LANDOR’S ‘ROSE AYLMER’: ‘I’m far the most popular of this “Best
Hundred”: I’m so easily learned by heart, I’m so short and sweet.’
SMART’S ‘SONG TO DAVID’: ‘But I’m the longest and I’m good all
through.’
SHIRLEY’S ‘THE GLORIES OF OUR BLOOD AND STATE’: ‘I have the best
beginning.’
SHAKESPEARE’S ‘FIDELE’S DIRGE’: ‘And I’m by Shakespeare.’
MAHONY’S ‘THE BELLS OF SHANDON’: ‘I have the most rhymes.’
HOOD’S ‘I REMEMBER, I REMEMBER’: ‘I appeal to the Universal Heart
of Man.’
GRAY’S ‘ODE TO A FAVOURITE CAT’: ‘I never fail to get a laugh with
my little joke in the fourth stanza.’
ANON’S ‘SUMMER IS ICUMEN IN’: ‘I’m the oldest poem in the book.’
MR. YEATS’ ‘INISFREE’: ‘My bloke’s still alive and he’s got the
Nobel Prize for being the best poet IN THE WORLD.’
It is doubtful whether even the ‘masterpieces’ can weather the effects
of being anthologized. The reprinted poem is not like the copied
art-treasure. Every accurate reprinting of a poem _is_ the original.
If this were clearer, perhaps, some appeal might be made to the
anthologist against debasing the poem in what is seldom more than
commercial exploitation--or at best the distribution of masterpieces as
an aristocratic largesse to the reading populace.
Apart from the general damage suffered by ‘best poems’ in being herded
together in anthologies, there are particular ill-effects arising
from the forced association of the poets themselves. The Countess of
Pembroke’s _For the Healing of the Nations_ was published during the
War in aid of the Red Cross; a Wiltshire anthology which, suffering
from a traumatic neurosis, overflowed into ‘all climes and ages’ and
may be taken as type of the honestly irresponsible collection. Here is
the list of contributors in full, and the editor’s note:
Beaconsfield, Earl of (Benjamin Disraeli)
Binyon, Laurence
Bridges, Robert
Brooke, Rupert
Bunston, Anna (Mrs. de Bary)
Coleridge, Miss Mary E.
Confucius
Corneille
Crewe, Marquis of
De la Mare, Walter
Diane, Comtesse
Dostoievsky
Ecclesiastes
Elizabeth, Queen
Engleheart, George
Epictetus
Euripides
Fonblanque, Ethel M. de (Mrs. Arthur Harter)
Gales, R. L.
Glenconner, Lady
Hamilton, Lord Frederic
Harte, Bret
Henniker-Major, Hon. Ethel
Herbert, George
Johnston, H. F.
Jonson, Ben
Jones, I. W.
Keble, John
à Kempis, Thomas
Kipling, Rudyard
Lyttleton, Hon. Mrs. A.
Malone, W.
Meynell, Mrs. Wilfred
More, Thomas
Morley, Viscount
Newbolt, Sir Henry
Pawlowska, Yoi
Pembroke, Sidney, Earl of
Pound, Ezra
Remizov, Alexey
Richardson, Mrs. H.
Robinson, W. F.
Rogers, Samuel
Sackville, Lady Margaret
Seaman, Sir Owen
Shakespeare, William
Slow, Edward
Taylor, Jeremy
Tennant, Hon. E. Wyndham
Theresa, St.
Thoreau
Traherne, Thomas
Trench, Herbert
Underhill, Miss Evelyn
Voltaire
Williams, Alfred
‘If I have inadvertently committed any breach of copyright I must beg
forgiveness, stating at the same time that in every case I have tried
my best to trace the owner and to print nothing without permission.’
Euripides, Samuel Rogers, Confucius, Voltaire and St. Theresa,
etc., must certainly have generously waived this little question of
copyright-fees, for it was all for the Good Cause. But they must have
had great difficulty keeping up the conversation. When Ecclesiastes and
Disraeli exchanged
‘Remember also thy Creator in the days of thy youth,’
and
‘It is a holy thing to see a nation saved by its youth;’
even their common nationality and the common rhythm of their sentiments
can hardly have reconciled them. Shakespeare probably felt a similar
embarrassment with Sir Owen Seaman. After hearing the latter’s
‘England, in this great fight to which you go
Because, where Honour calls you, go you must ...’
he must have felt like a cad in making this contribution:
‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.’
Shelley, Sidney Suckling, Scott and the other S’s, even Siegfried
Sassoon, he had met before and could comfortably exchange handshakes
with, but the Editor of _Punch_! He would rather admit himself Bacon
and ‘bear it out even to the edge of doom’ in the company of Laurence
Binyon and T. E. Brown. This particular anthology is obviously too
diffident to have lasting ill-effects on the better poems. But the
regular anthology on which it is modelled is not redeemed by any such
weakness.
The technique of the anthology is particularly apparent in the
arrangement of poems. If the alphabetic arrangement has been chosen we
always, for instance, get the same poem of Lamb’s run up against the
same three of Landor’s; or if the arrangement is according to date of
birth and date of death we always get the same three poems of Landor’s
run up against the same one of Lamb’s. Lamb and Landor become twinned
in the mind as inevitably as Scylla and Charybdis, Sacco and Vanzetti,
David and Jonathan, Mutt and Jeff. Yet what real connection is there
between Landor’s poetry and Lamb’s? One would say none at all. Landor
was austere, select, ambitious, restrained; Lamb was open-hearted,
unassuming, a punster, not ashamed of having common sentiments and
setting them down simply. How then does the more ingenious anthologist
fit them into his scheme of composite-authorship? As follows. Lamb’s
_Old Familiar Faces_ (which occurred in every anthology but nine of
the sixty-eight that we examined for this purpose) can be supplemented
by his uncharacteristic _Hester_, which makes a perfect bridge between
Landor’s uncharacteristic _Rose Aylmer_ and _The Old Familiar Faces_.
That is the trick at a glance. But let us take further examples.
Collins and Pope are near enough contemporaries to be worth tuning
together. A careful choice of their poems will therefore be necessary.
Collins’
‘How sleep the brave who sink to rest
By all their country’s wishes bless’d!’
is near enough in style to Pope’s _Ode on Solitude_:
‘Happy the man whose wish and care
A few paternal acres share’--
to give the necessary illusion of composite authorship. Pope may, as in
a short anthology like Mr. Gowans’ _Hundred Best Poems (Lyrical)_, be
alphabetically cast on the same page as Samuel Rogers. What then? Well,
that same poem of Pope’s is one of the few things he wrote short enough
to anthologize, so Rogers must be searched for a companion piece. Mr.
Gowans has managed splendidly. He has found a poem which can actually
be interdigitated with Pope’s without interrupting the sense of either.
It is called _A Wish_. So the title of the doubled poem which we shall
print for fun will be
_Ode to Wished-for Solitude_
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air
In his own ground.
(_Mine_ be that cot beside the hill.
The bee-hives hum shall soothe _my_ ear.
A willowy brook, that turns a mill,
With many a fall shall linger near).
Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose tree in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.
(The swallow oft beneath _my_ thatch
Shall twitter from her clay-built nest.
Oft shall the pilgrim lift the latch
And share _my_ meal, a welcome guest).
Blest who can unconcern’dly find
Hours, days and years slide soft away
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day.
(Around _my_ ivied porch shall spring
Each fragrant flower that drinks the dew,
And _Lucy_ at her wheel shall sing
In russet gown and apron blue).
Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mixed; sweet recreation;
And innocence which most does please
With meditation.
The village church among the trees
Where first our marriage-vows were given
With merry peals shall swell the breeze
And point with taper spire to heaven.
_Envoi._
Thus let us live, unseen, unknown,
Thus unlamented let us die,
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where we lie.
A happy combination. Pope’s Ideal Man does the milking, ploughing and
wood-chopping. Rogers’ Lucy minds the spinning-wheel and does not
interfere with the study, ease and recreation which her goodman finds
time for in intervals of husbandry. Rogers’ Ideal Man does not add any
tasks to Pope’s except bee-keeping, and supplies abundance of local
amenities. But do you find a discrepancy between Pope’s solitude and
Rogers’ pilgrim and his Lucy? It is all right really. Do not think that
Pope’s Ideal Man was intended to live literally unseen and unknown,
any more than Rogers intended his Ideal Man to entertain pilgrims.
Pope’s man knows well enough that as a farmer he will need a wife to
make butter and the beds, and that he will have to show himself at
markets occasionally, and that as a reader he will have to go out and
buy books. Rogers’ man knows well enough that the age of pilgrimages is
long over in England and that vagabonds will not presume to take him
literally. The only textual change that we have made is in the _Envoi_,
where we have included Lucy.
All this is not primarily a criticism of Pope or of Rogers but of
the anthologist who discovered the poems and threw them together
close enough to let them grow into a single piece; and again of the
anthologist who described both these poems in his preface as ‘gems of
purest ray serene’ instead of disregarding them in the first case as
ineffective and false, as he would admit if confronted with the history
of their authors in relation to such idealistic pictures of simple life.
Need we take the chain of composite authorship farther forward or
backward? We could show how, in alphabetical anthologies, Collins’
_How sleep the brave_ will pair with Campbell’s _Toll for the Brave_;
and how Rogers and Wordsworth are close enough in date to get thrown
together in unalphabetical anthologies, so that Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’
will get somehow identified with Rogers’ ‘Lucy’ poem given above; and
how in a subject-anthology, under the heading of ‘Lost Maidens,’ the
‘Lucy of the Springs of Dove’ will get confused with Kingsley’s ‘Mary
of the Sands of Dee.’
Once these confusions start, there is no checking them. Byron’s praise
of his mistress:
‘She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes ...’
is infected by and infecting Sir Henry Wotton’s praise of his:
‘You meaner beauties of the night
That poorly satisfy our eyes
More by your number than your light,
You common people of the skies ...’
Shirley and Shakespeare, alphabetically allied, get entangled:
‘... There is no armour against fate,
Death lays his icy hand on kings--
Sceptre and Crown
Must tumble down
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in their dust’;
and
‘Fear no more the frown of the great,
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke!
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak;
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this and come to dust.’
When the anthology is used for recitations in schools and Goldsmith’s
_Deserted Village_ and Gray’s contiguous _Elegy_ and Arnold’s _Scholar
Gipsy_ are as usual learned by heart, further unfortunate associations
occur:
‘This said, he left them and returned no more:
But rumours hung about the country-side
That the lost scholar long was seen to stray,
Seen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied ...
‘Shepherds had met him on the Hurst in spring ...
‘Haply some hoary headed swain may say,
“Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
Brushing with hasty steps the dew away
To meet the sun upon the upland lawn” ...
‘One morn I missed him on the customed hill ...
‘How often have I loitered o’er thy green
Where humble happiness endeared each scene ...
‘But times are altered.....
Usurp the land and dispossess the swain;
Along the lawn where scattered hamlets rose ...’
until there is nothing left of these poems but confused recollections
of Dr. Thomas Arnold’s _Elegy in a Deserted Schoolyard_.
Through likeness of title and nearness of date poems so fundamentally
unlike as Keats’ _Nightingale_ and Shelley’s _Skylark_ affect each
other strangely; the rhythm of the one ‘vibrates in the memory’ and
unsettles the other, and it requires a serious mental effort to assign
the right bird to the right case.
The fact that both poems are sonnets and written about the same period
will link up Keats’ _On first looking into Chapman’s Homer_ with
Wordsworth’s _The World is too much with us_:
‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When some new planet swims into his ken,
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men ...’
with
‘So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn,
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn ...’
although by themselves Keats’ sonnets read like Keats, and Wordsworth’s
like Wordsworth without the possibility of confusion.
Between Ben Jonson and Burns there seems little danger of mistaken
identity; yet after a course of anthology-reading ‘Drink to me only
with thine eyes’ is indistinguishable in manner from ‘O my luve is
like a red, red rose’ and ‘Go fetch to me a pint of wine’; Milton’s
_Nativity Hymn_ becomes an intimation of Wordsworthian Immortality, and
Herrick writes lyrics for the Elizabethan dramatists.
If _Annie Laurie_ is included it is long odds against the original
version (_not_ by Lady John Scott but by Douglas of Fingland in 1680)
being included even in an appendix, as Colonel John Buchan has done in
his _Northern Muse_. Instead of
‘She’s backit like the peacock,
She’s breastit like the swan,
She’s jimp aboot the middle,
Her waist ye weel micht span:
Her waist ye weel micht span
And she hath a rolling ee ...’
we have a censored version in which Annie Laurie appears demure rather
than wild:
‘Her brow is like the snaw-drift,
Her neck is like the swan,
Her face it is the fairest
That e’er the sun shone on:
That e’er the sun shone on.
And dark-blue is her ee ...’
an opportune bridge between Burns and Moore.
The reader whose first approach to poetry is through anthologies
usually acquires the anthology habit for life; he cannot distinguish
poets from each other by what may be called the _handwriting quality_
in their poems. It hardly occurs to him that there is such a quality,
or that it is worth discovering by reading poetry in its original
setting. If you ask him who wrote ‘God’s in His Heaven, all’s well
with the world,’ he will likely enough reply: ‘I don’t know the name,
but it’s on page 856 of the _Oxford Book of English Verse_--didn’t he
also write “_Where the Mayne glideth_” and that nice poem about “_The
pleasant waters of the river Lee_”? I’m bad at names.’ He has never
read a long poem or anything much longer than the _Scholar Gipsy_ and
the abridged _Love in the Valley_ by George Meredith. He cannot read
any poem which presents the slightest difficulty of thought, which
demands, that is, more than one reading. He regards poetry as a patent
food, ‘Just add hot water and serve.’ He calls himself a lover of
poetry if he has stored up a few rhetorical plums such as Lovelace’s
‘I could not love thee, dear, so much
Loved I not Honour more’;
Or Jonson’s
‘Death, ere thou hast slain another
Learn’d and fair and good as she
Time shall throw a dart at thee’;
or Keats’
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’--
for social occasions. But take the first quotation. The sentiment is
neatly rendered but fundamentally dishonest. Merely preferring martial
honour to his mistress’ arms did not help Lovelace in any way to love
her so much. He loved her less, in fact, because she had, as a woman,
lower social rating than the sword, the horse, the shield. There is
no causal relation here between love and honour--artful cavalier
flattery disguises a set of brutal sentiments that might otherwise
disgust even an anthologist and his public. Then the second quotation.
The Countess of Pembroke had been a generous patroness to poets and
Jonson’s prophecy that she would have no rival to the end of time might
pass if he had contented himself with a simple and dignified recital of
her personal qualities. Instead, however, he closes his tribute with a
poetical flourish that robs it of seriousness. For, though visitors to
the church-memorial or readers of a popular anthology may be impressed
by these fine words, Death won’t. As for Keats, the equation between
Truth and Beauty, together with the conclusion, is just a clumsy
attempt at a serious proposition in logic. Compare it with these two
inspired formulas by Mr. W. E. Johnson:
‘The factual universal may be expressed in the form “Every substantive
in the universe of reality is Q if P”; while the assertion of law
assumes the form “Any substantive in the universe of reality would be Q
if it were P.”’[7]
Our remarks on the effect on the poem of being repeatedly anthologized,
its slow spiritual breakdown, may be considered fanciful. But of the
bad effect on the reader of repeatedly reading the same poem there
need be no dispute; we have only to try the following experiment: If
you say the same word, any word--say, if you say the word ‘word’; say
it--‘word,’ ‘word,’ ‘word,’ like that a few times over: then you have
‘word’ for awhile stripped clean and new. You realize its character,
its sound, the letters that compose it, as you haven’t done for years.
But then go on, a hundred times more, saying the word ‘word’--‘word,’
‘word,’ ‘word,’ and it gets completely ga-ga as a word. In fact
the word ‘word’ has already in this paragraph begun to fail in its
habitual organization, to change colour and suggest other similar words
like ‘wood’ and ‘ward’ and ‘wort’ and ‘wart,’ until you will soon
not be able to recognize it as your old friend ‘word.’ This curious
obliteration is, of course, the common fate of prayers. When the
bedesman has said ten thousand _ave’s_ for the repose of a rich man’s
soul there is no telling what the ten-thousand-and-first _ave_ will
mean to him.
There are three stages in repetition: the first when the sense still
persists; the second when it wavers and breaks and free-association
begins; the third when free association itself breaks down and the
thing repeated becomes a pure incantation. When you get a pure
incantation, it is no longer a case of the word or prayer having any
soul of its own, even its friends (that is, the associated ideas) have
deserted it: it becomes an empty lodging in which any strange creature
may choose to nest. That is why clergymen often have such haunted
faces. In the technical religious phrase the arrival at this stage in
prayer is called ‘accidie’: it is the time when the Belgian-looking
devils slip in. The first act of black magic is to empty a prayer of
religious meaning and so smuggle something anti-religious in. You can
always tell by listening to a clergyman when he has reached this stage
of ‘accidie.’ He may be able to repeat all the prayers word-perfectly;
but there is a note (like the note of the churn when butter has at
last begun to form) which is unmistakable. Usually, however, as in a
musical-box a note gets broken, so a word will break in a prayer. We
know a parish church where the parson Sunday after Sunday intones:
‘Who _desireth the death_ of a sinner, but rather that he should
turn from his wickedness and live’;
and the congregation, as spell-bound as he, never notices the
disappearance of an important negative.
A rather worse case was that of a lecturer during the War who was
employed by the War Office to address troops on the subject of ‘Our War
Aims.’ It was at first, in 1914, quite a good lecture. The lecturer
did not let it harden into a formula until late in the Spring of 1915,
when he nevertheless gave it accurately and with conviction and without
personal strain. In 1916 it was still word-perfect, but the lecturer
had lost reality: he looked dim on the platform. Late in 1917 it had
begun to fray: there was no actual break of sense, but the words were
strangely clipped and slurred and the lecturer was in a complete state
of self-hypnosis. Shortly before the Armistice there was a nervous
breakdown. There had been some violent disturbance during the lecture
(an Australian audience had begun to barrack) and the hypnosis had
been interrupted. The lecturer had tried to get into familiar touch
again with his own lecture, but the result was a bad short-circuit.
The catenation broke and the lecture degenerated into a recurring
sequence of three sentences, including the joke (always sure of a
laugh) about the Entente Cordiale and King Edward VII’s ‘love of French
Institutions.’
Consider, then, in the light of these effects of repetition, the case
of the anthology poem, such as _L’Allegro_ or Shakespeare’s _When
in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes_, which probably had a bad
beginning with the anthology reader when he first learned them by
heart in the class-room. In the class-room meaning could obviously not
have mattered, but memory and ‘expression’ did. And what the adult
reader recognizes when he reads these poems in an anthology again
are not meaning-echoes but memory- or expression-echoes of what, in
recitation, received most emphasis. He will greet again such phrases as
‘Come and trip it as you go, On the light fantastic toe,’ or ‘Trouble
deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,’ and get nothing from them but
repetition-pleasure. By the time he has repeated them to himself a few
dozen times (a particular line often getting associated with a habitual
act such as shaving, or posting a letter, or eating the breakfast egg)
and has seen the ‘light fantastic toe’ quoted a few dozen times in
theatrical journals and ‘Trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries’
quoted a few dozen times on the comic pages of fiction monthlies, he
will be unable to realize that ‘fantastic toe’ and ‘bootless cries’
have real meanings. He will have the same blank feeling towards them
as towards words like _peppermint_ or _hedgehog_ which he never by
any chance breaks up into their original parts, ‘mint’ and ‘pepper,’
‘hog’ and ‘hedge,’ but remembers by a vague sensuous image. The popular
anthologist makes a practice of including as many poems of this
exhausted character as he conveniently can; they give neither himself
nor the reader any trouble.
‘Beachcomber,’ of the _London Express_, knows all about anthologies:
ANOTHER ANTHOLOGY
‘Mr. Dribble’s “Hundred Best Telephone Numbers” is all that an
anthology should be. It is comprehensive and free from prejudice.
Moreover, it includes many new numbers, the compiler having gone to
the little-known outlying exchanges for fresh talent. 28443 Pobham,
for instance, is a genuine discovery. Nearly all the favourite
West-End exchanges are well represented, but one misses the superb
00010001 Mayfair. Also, one could have done with more Park numbers.
It must be admitted, however, that the compiler has done his work
so well that he has included numbers to suit all tastes. And if I
were condemned to a life in prison or on a desert island, and were
allowed to take six numbers with me, I should find them all in this
anthology. One may conclude with the hope that each one of these
hundred numbers may find an answering echo in at least one exchange.
* * * * *
‘I understand that the success of this anthology has emboldened
Mr. Dribble to prepare a similar work, which will be called the
“Hundred Best Trains.”’
Chapter V
THE PERFECT MODERN LYRIC
The effect of anthologies on the general reader extends into criticism:
the professional critic is in most cases merely a more than usually
infatuated reader of anthologies. The critic’s business has come to
be to condone the general reader’s wilful inertness; to reprove or
neglect poets who do not take these into account; and to bear out
his assumption that the poet’s first thought in writing a poem is
its eventual inclusion in an anthology. How general this assumption
is can be seen by a glance at Mr. Norman Ault’s[8] _Elizabethan
Lyrics_. (On the whole this is quite a scholarly and honest piece
of editing; if it had been content to include only the ten hitherto
unpublished pieces and the two or three hundred pieces otherwise
difficult of access it would have been worthy of even greater praise.
But the editor’s scholar’s-conscience has not been proof against the
popular-anthology temptation of using _Elizabethan_ in an ‘æsthetic’
sense. The Elizabethan age closed abruptly with the death of the Queen
and the accession of the unlovable, unfearable and un-English James I.
And about a third of the poems are Jacobean in date, or probably more,
including one or two of Shakespeare’s sonnets. A number were written in
the 1530’s and are only made Elizabethan by the doubtful expedient of
printing Tottel’s versions rewritten twenty-five years later to suit
contemporary taste. The only connection between poems written in the
middle of the reign of Henry VIII and those written at the end of the
reign of James I is, indeed, that they are both un-Elizabethan.)
Mr. Ault writes in his preface (the italics are ours):
‘The poems are arranged neither in the order of the birthdays of
the authors, nor according to subject matter: but year by year
according to the dates at which each poem _first became known
to the public for which the author wrote_. This plan renders it
possible to see each poem _in relation to its proper historical
background of contemporary song and thus to estimate its
comparative as well as its actual quality_; and in the case of
the _better known_ poets (who are _of course_ represented by more
numerous selections) to study the development of the work of the
individual author.’
We have here then the editor in a dual anthology rôle: as a modern
anthologist catering retrospectively to Elizabethan public taste and
as an Elizabethan anthologist catering prospectively to modern public
taste. The result is a two-fold distortion: not only the distortion
of textual material into æsthetic material but the distortion of the
æsthetic material as well. An Elizabethan anthologist turning the same
textual material into æsthetic material would have studied a taste very
different from Mr. Ault’s twentieth-century high-brow taste. Instead
of Shakespeare forty-eight poems, Breton nine, he would have made it
Shakespeare nine, Breton forty-eight.
The little dedication of _Printer to Reader_ which Mr. Ault puts at
the beginning of his collection, borrowing it from the Elizabethan
anthologist of _A Handful of Pleasant Delights_, 1584, may be touching;
but it is most inappropriate when made to introduce a number of poems
by Vaux, Wyatt, Shakespeare, Donne and others which do not correspond
with the anthology taste of the book to which it was originally
attached:
‘You that in music do delight
Your minds for to solàce,
This little book of sonnets may
Well like you in that case.
Here may you have such pretty things
As women much desire:
Here may you have of sundry sorts
Such songs as you require.
Wherefore, my friend, if you regard
Such songs to read or hear,
Doubt not to buy this pretty Book,
The price is not so dear.’[9]
Mr. Ault, in spite of what he writes about his arrangement, does
give a list of authors with dates of birth, and does give a careful
subject-concordance with such headings as _Time_ (see also ‘Beauty’
and ‘Gather the Rose-bud’), _Tobacco_, _Town Life_, _Trade_, _Travel_,
_Tristia_, _Toilet_. He will be much preyed on by future anthologists.
‘And by God’s Body,’ in Wyatt’s words, ‘I would he might be so served,
and then were he well served.’ He makes this subject-arrangement
because he knows that the reader, finding it impossible to connect
poems with the names of their authors, is inclined to group poetry in
his mind according to subject (as ‘Thus the Mayne glideth’ is grouped
with ‘The pleasant waters of the river Lee’ and various Skylarks with
various Nightingales).
The effect of this practice on criticism will, we hope, be made
clear by instancing several modern poems that have gained undeserved
reputation by it. The first is a poem of which we have a right to
speak more severely than others because one of us first met it in a
popular anthology and the other wrote it. It was written in a crowded
room when the author was just nineteen, with official stationery and
gramophone intermissions. The subject was suggested by a reproduction,
in a Christmas supplement, of Holman Hunt’s ‘Scapegoat.’ This public
setting for the birth of the poem may have had something to do with its
subsequent popularity: public sentiment somehow infiltrated. We would
not say that the poem was originally dishonest in its conception, but
it certainly is made to appear so by its being anthologized; and now
even its author can only with difficulty remember the genuine feelings
that provided it with a nucleus.
The story was simple; a supposed tender encounter between Christ
and the yearly scapegoat in the Wilderness. Little thought was
necessary after the first three lines; it only required a quaint
assemblage of desert animals recalled from Isaiah, and a grafting of
the love-of-animals theme on the Christ theme to help it out. There
is a loose equation of Christ with the scapegoat, and the scapegoat
weeps like Blake’s Lion when he found himself in an equally tender
relationship with Lyca in the _Songs of Innocence_. And that is all.
The only flaw in it as an anthology piece has been that in one line
the definite article was found wanting. But the anthologists soon put
that right (without the author’s consent) and the perversity has never
been allowed to return. The poem has been in at least seventeen English
anthologies and several more in America. Its increment by this means
has been six or seven times as much as the total proceeds of the three
editions of the volume in which it first appeared.
It is very accommodating as an anthology-piece. It is a poem about
animals, it is a poem about Christ, it is a poem about comradeship, it
is a ‘Shorter Lyric of the Twentieth Century,’ it is in rhyme, it is
easily learned in schools, and it takes you nowhere quite safely after
giving you the feeling that you have been a long distance. Because of
the author’s alphabetical position it always forms such a pleasant
little curtain-raiser to Gray’s _Elegy_ that the children love it.
With a single not serious lapse, a poem fancifully combining natural
history with unhappy love, this author has written no other successful
anthology-piece, and so remains for the public, in spite of all that
has happened since, the author of ‘that poem about the Goat.’ Emile
Cammaerts, the Belgian critic of English poetry, has written of him as
‘one of the rising modern religious poets of England’ solely on the
strength of these lines. A press-cutting recently received informs us:
‘The King Alfred School of Hampstead has its own printing press,
from which a fascinating anthology has emerged with a squirrel on
the cover. It is an anthology of beasts and birds, and it faintly
adumbrates what might be collected and embalmed for the delight
of naturalists and animal lovers ... it is an unconventional and
what is called an “experimental” School. Anyway, there are two
quotations from Tennyson and all of Gray’s lines “On a Favourite
Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes” ... and Mr. W. H. Davies’
“Kingfisher” and “Jenny Wren” ...’
And, of course, the Scapegoat is there (though without permission). Now
if that little poem had been left alone it would not have been a bad
little poem, though rather muddled and young and silly. But it has gone
to the devil now and fancies itself as a perfect lyric, and nothing
will bring it to its senses short of putting it back again among the
other rather muddled and young and silly pieces of the book which first
included it.
The other author of this book has had the similar experience of being
represented in popular anthologies only by juvenilia. The editor of a
‘Best Poems’ anthology has recently written to apologize that the poems
he asks for are not her best or most characteristic, but that he fears
for the saleability of his collection. This apology does not, however,
occur in his preface.
The popular anthology-piece, like the best-seller novel, is usually
achieved in the dark; but certain critical regulations can be made for
it. It must be fairly regular in form and easily memorized, it must
be a new combination of absolutely worn-out material, it must have
a certain unhealthy vigour or languor, and it must start off with a
simple and engaging statement of a sentimental character. Somewhere
there must be a daring poetical image such as:
‘If ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields’;
or,
‘The Master said:
“I have planted the Seed of a Tree,
It shall be strangely fed
With white dew and with red,
And the Gardeners shall be Three,
Regret, Hope, Memory!”’
It must have as many ‘subjects’ in it as possible, so that it can be
easily shifted about by the anthologist from one section of his book to
the other wherever fattening is required.
Mr. Yeats’ _Lake Isle of Inisfree_ is a striking example of a poem
that started in innocence, but the progress of which from anthology to
anthology suggests that of the ‘simple village maiden’ of the ballad,
‘Victim of a _Squire’s Whim_’:
‘So away she went to London
For to hide her sin and shame,
But she met _another_ Squire,
And _again_ she lost her name.’
Note the applicability of the ironic end of the ballad:
‘In a cottage in the country
Her old honest parents live,
Drinking champagne which she sends them--
But they NEVER can forgive.’
The ordinary reader is inclined to take _Inisfree_ for granted as a
‘perfect lyric’ on the assurance of the critics, and will be surprised,
when he examines it out of its anthology setting, to see what a misery
it really is. True to anthology-type, it begins with the necessary
simple sentimental statement: the Biblical ‘I will arise and go unto my
father’ is padded with the poetical repetition of ‘and go’:
‘I will arise and go now, and go to Inisfree.’
The name ‘Inisfree’ is a romantic invention, with the syllable ‘free’
slipped in to help the reader to the conclusion that Inisfree isn’t the
name of an up-to-date private nursing-home or the prodigal’s father’s
house; but an island refuge, somewhere remote and solitary, in Ireland
of the legends.
‘And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made.’
The smallness of the cabin suggests the complete enervation of the
poet who could not even trouble to build himself a roomy retreat,
and his complete improvidence against the damp of an Irish winter:
this fatalism is likely to meet with a ready response from the
reader who has been already enervated by an extensive course of
anthology-browsing. The most miserable touch is the proposal to _build_
a cabin which he magically finds already _made_ before he reaches
the end of the line: suggesting the wish-fulfilment mechanism of the
ordinary fatigue-dream. Anthology lyrics are as a matter of fact the
only form of poetry that can be rightly compared with the dream, which
in general may be regarded as the unchecked running-down of a theme
(first suggested in waking life) to a finish either of exhaustion
and indecision or of false, because disorderly decision. Dreams are
born of the will to disintegrate physically, such poems of the will
to disintegrate mentally. In both you find the same surrender to
sensuality, a sleepy luxuriousness which is what is commonly meant by
‘poetic ecstasy.’ And as in dreams one constantly finds oneself making
witty jokes which, when one wakes up, do not hold together as jokes at
all, so in this type of poetry one gets, as we shall see, the poetic
conceit which does not hold together either.
‘Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee.’
Nine, because that is a mystic number. How long in extent the bean-rows
were, does not appear. The reader is expected to react to the mystic
‘nine’ and say, ‘Probably some deep Hermetic mystery is intended, or
some strange Celtic allegory.’ But Mr. Yeats is only dreaming, not
exercising thought; this ‘nine’ is a plain confession of muzziness,
justifying our continued line by line prose-analysis. The ‘honey-bee,’
too, is just a mysterious synonym for the ordinary bee; and when the
phrase ‘a hive for the honey-bee’ is put in apposition to ‘bean-rows,’
it can only mean that the poet, being too lazy to build his own skips,
lets the bees swarm among his beans. But even so, the bees will never
make their hive _in_ the beans but will choose a hollow tree at some
distance from the cabin. Note the ugly clash between _bean_ and _bees_.
‘And live alone in the bee-loud glade.’
Bee-loud is another would-be poetical phrase, suggesting rather the
police-court report: ‘Your worship, defendant used improper language
while I was at my piano-practice. “Dee you,” she said, “you’re making
too bee-loud a noise for _my_ peace and quiet.”’ As for the sentiment,
it is only a weak repetition of Pope’s _Ode to Solitude_ and Rogers’
_A Wish_, cutting down the simple necessities desired by those earlier
sentimentalists to a point far below subsistence level.
‘And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of morning to where the cricket sings.’
Again the poetical repetition concealing the impoverishment of thought.
In this second line we have the showy conceit necessary to suggest
profundity. Presumably the veils of morning are the dawn-clouds, and
the place where the cricket sings is the cabin hearth: ‘peace comes
down the chimney every morning’ is what Yeats really meant. The second
half of the first line, because of ‘for,’ must grammatically explain
the first half: because of the slowness of peace as it drops, the poet
will be able to catch some of it at least as it comes slowly down the
chimney every morning.
‘There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.’
This is further extravagance to set off the ‘veils of morning.’
A-glimmering midnights are rare in Ireland; you wouldn’t get linnets in
a flock except in the late summer migration which is incompatible with
the bee and bean-flower context, nor are linnets particularly active
in the evening. But ‘midnight,’ ‘glimmer,’ ‘evening’ and ‘linnet’ are
poetical words and must go in, despite the sense: so is ‘purple,’ the
easiest colour-disguise for feeble workmanship both in painting and
poetry (and for that matter in music)--purple began as the colour
of kingliness and ended as the colour of anæmia and half-mourning.
‘Linnet’ is chosen from all the other birds because it begins
with ‘L,’ and part of the Lullaby quality of the poem is got by an
over-proportion of l’s to natural requirements. No modern poet, it is
safe to say, with the exception of Edmund Blunden and Robert Frost, can
distinguish a linnet from any other small bird with a squeaky little
voice: but the linnet is as fashionable in contemporary nature-verse as
the lark and nightingale used to be.
‘I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore.’
This is an attempt to pull the poem together, before it dissolves
into mush, by reintroducing the action idea: but not real action,
only a repetition of the resolution in the opening line, which has
not yet been and indeed never could be translated into practice.
The over-alliterative description of noises in the head reads as
pathological, especially in view of the poet’s previous auditory
absorption in the buzzing of bees and the whirring of linnets’ wings.
‘While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,’
Is there here an antithesis between the roadway and the pavement? If
so, it is not clearly made. And how does ‘while I stand’ square with ‘I
will arise’? Perhaps he stood on the roadway but sat on the pavement.
Why the ‘pavement gray?’ Is that an inversion for the sake of the
rhyme, or does ‘gray’ refer predicatively to the poet? Why all the
‘ay’ sounds? Are they intended to create a melancholy urban sound in
contrast with the Tennysonian vowel-variation of the preceding line; or
is it just carelessness, and is the internal rhyme of ‘way’ and ‘gray’
unintentional? It was foolish, anyhow, to mention the ‘pavement gray’
because this definitely introduces the time-note and accentuates the
hopelessness of the fancy.
‘I hear it in the deep heart’s core.’
What he means is either ‘in the core of my heart,’ or ‘deep in my
heart.’ But, unable to make the verse fit with only one of these
phrases, he combines the two metaphors of _depth_ and _centrality_ of
emotion in a way that defeats his meaning; for he has had to leave out
the important word ‘my’ (it would have made the line end in too many
heavy syllables running): so that the possessor of the heart may be
anyone or anything. Certainly with whatever qualities the hero of such
a simple-life romance might properly adorn himself, depth or centrality
of emotion is not one of them (nor ordinary common-sense).
Still, as anthology material _Inisfree_ is invaluable. It can be
classified under ‘Rustic,’ ‘Mystic,’ ‘Thoughts from Town,’ ‘Irish
Sentiment,’ ‘Solitude,’ ‘Exile,’ ‘Love of Animals,’ ‘Natural Religion’
and other anthology headings, and must have proved a little gold-mine
to its author. We conclude our criticism by a fugitive epigram:
_Inisfree on its Author._
In the Senate house in Dublin
My old honest author sits
Drinking champagne on the proceeds
Of his early loss of wits.
Mr. De la Mare’s _Arabia_ hangs together better than most anthology
pieces because it is _all_ muzzy:
‘Far are the shades of Arabia
Where the Princes ride at noon
’Mid the verdurous vales and thickets
Under the ghost of the moon.
And so dark is that vaulted purple
Flowers in the forest rise
And toss into blossom ’gainst the phantom stars
Pale in the noonday skies.’
If we are to trust travellers, there are no shades in Arabia,
particularly at noon, except in sand-storms. There are no forests. The
moon and stars are not visible at noon: except in the rainy season,
which lasts for a week or two, the sky is as bright as brass at noon.
The Arabians, princes and all, do most of their riding at night.
Flowers do appear in certain districts each spring, but grow low on the
ground and are soon burned up.
‘Sweet is the music of Arabia
In my heart, when out of dreams
I still in the thin clear mirk of dawn
Descry her gliding streams;
Hear her strange lutes on the green banks
Ring loud with the grief and delight
Of the dim-silked dark-haired Musicians
In the brooding silence of night.’
Streams are not characteristic of Arabia except in the short rainy
season, when they rush rather than glide. Lutes are not native to the
East in spite of the Authorized Version of the _Book of Daniel_ (where
they occur with harps, sackbuts and psalteries); and Arabian music is
not in any sense sweet like the music of people who live in wooded
countries and have singing birds such as the thrush to model it upon,
but harsh and bare and monotonous like the desert.
‘They haunt me--her lutes and her forests;
No beauty on earth I see
But shadowed with that dream recalls
Her loveliness to me:
Still eyes look coldly upon me,
Cold voices whisper and say--
“He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,
They have stolen his wits away.”’
This poem is a clear proof of the justice of the comparison that
we made between the anthology lyric and the dream, particularly the
fatigue-dream. If this poem had been written as poetry and not as
poetic ecstacy, the word Arabia would never have been allowed to enter;
either an actual place would have been chosen like Cambodia, where
much of what he says in the poem applies, or a new name would have
been coined. But Mr. De la Mare has had a confused, luxurious dream
in which the hackneyed lines ‘I’ll sing thee songs of Araby and tales
of far Cashmere’ have developed without any wakeful restraint into
this foolish fantasy which combines the silken Prince of Araby with
the forests, flowers and silks of Cashmere and identifies the ‘songs
of Araby’ with the Victorian song which celebrates them. The last
stanza which admits the craziness of the dream and its distortion of
waking life, is the best argument against the poem as a poem and its
best ticket of admission into the anthology, where it will continue
for many years to _cheat_ people of a sigh and _charm_ them to a tear.
The desire of certain poems to leave the company of their fellows in
the individual volume, seek their fortune and finally end their lives
as perfect lyrics in a standard popular anthology comes not from
enterprise but depravity. ‘Why poems leave home’ is a story of disgrace
rather than of glory. For it can be laid down as a fairly fast rule
that any modern piece that has achieved the popularity of _Inisfree_
or _Arabia_ must be functionally half-witted or contain at least one
crucial perversion of thought.
Mr. Ralph Hodgson’s much anthologized _Bells of Heaven_, with its
humanitarian appeal for ‘wretched, blind pit-ponies and little hunted
hares,’ is easily recognizable as a black sheep of the Hodgson
menagerie. It offends us certainly to think of pit-ponies being kept
down in the dark until they lose the use of their eyes, and so it
should; but not disproportionately to other crimes of civilization.
Pit-ponies are more lovingly-treated than most of their kind above
ground; so that, indeed, the pit-pony often shows fewer signs of
wretchedness than the average miner or miner’s wife and family. Thus
the adjective ‘wretched’ can only apply fairly to certain particular
pit-ponies who happen to be wretched: and the cause of their
wretchedness is not specified. We would not insist on the weakness of
‘wretched’ if it were not matched by the ‘little’ hunted hares. The
hares hunted are not singled out for sport _because_ they are usually
small in size. Nor should mere size in any case induce pity: mice are
much smaller than hares and just as charming: but we destroy them
without protest from Mr. Hodgson. Bugs are smaller still. The ugliness
of hunting the hare is in the way that its wantonness is sportingly
disguised, not in the relative _size_ of man and hare: bigness in man
does not mean relatively greater speed. The first part of the poem is:
‘’Twould ring the Bells of Heaven
The wildest peal for years
If Parson lost his senses
And people came to theirs
And he and they together
Knelt down with angry prayers
For tamed and shabby tigers
And dancing dogs and bears....’
The conceit about losing one’s senses and coming to one’s senses bears
the whole burden of poeticality for this little piece and must be
supposed to be wittily intended: but when one examines the antithesis
it falls to pieces like the witticism of the dream examined in
daylight. If Parson is at present _in_ his senses, and ‘people’ are
_out_ of theirs, one would think that all that was necessary was for
Parson to kneel down and say the necessary prayers, and for the people
thereupon to come to their senses. No, Parson has first to _lose_
his senses. But if Parson lost his senses there would be no sensible
prayers. Mr. Hodgson probably intends that there is a callousness about
Parson in his sensible moods that would allow such things to continue
without protest. But if in Parson, why not in the Congregation?
Why shouldn’t they too lose their senses? If the first part of the
antithesis is meant ironically, why not the second? Why should Parson
come in for all the irony? And why should the bells of Heaven be so
enthusiastically rung at the receipt of these prayers which are not
contrite but definitely indignant, and addressed to the Deity. Must we
suppose that the angelic bell-ringers dare to sympathize with ‘people’
in their new-found indignation, the Deity corresponding in callousness
with His representative on earth, Parson? Must the Deity be persuaded
to lose His senses in order to preserve the logic of Mr. Hodgson’s
humanitarianism?
This piece cannot be judged as poetry any more than _Inisfree_; it
has to be judged as propaganda verse. The first test of propaganda
verse is whether it gives the message clearly: and we have found that
‘The Bells of Heaven’ are, in Mr. Hodgson’s hands, cracked. The next
test is whether its remedial suggestions are plausible. Now, there is
figurative sense in Shelley’s
‘Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay you low?’
There is superficial sense in the temperance hymn beginning:
‘Cold water is the best of drinks ...’
There is even a homely if fanciful wisdom in the eighteenth-century
catch:
‘Slaves to the World should be tossed in a blanket
If I might have my will ...’
But all that Mr. Hodgson can suggest to remedy the sufferings of (_a_)
caged tigers, (_b_) performing bears and dogs, (_c_) pit-ponies, (_d_)
hunted hares, is prayers to God by callous congregations miraculously
converted to Sunday humanitarianism. The very inefficacy of the
solution makes the poem delightful for anthology readers, for they
realize that they are not expected to do anything for the poor animals
but read it.
Dr. Bridges’ most anthologized poem is another piece of careless
carpentry:
‘I love all beauteous things,
I seek and adore them;
God hath no better praise,
And man in his hasty days
Is honoured for them.’
Of course he loves all beauteous things. He loves them because he
considers them beauteous, or he considers them beauteous because he
loves them--it doesn’t matter which. Naturally he seeks them and adores
them. He seeks them because he adores them or he adores them because
he seeks them--it doesn’t matter which. Naturally also, this being the
next thing on the list, he gives God praise, and he then gives man
honour--it doesn’t matter which. The question, however, arises: do the
beauteous things belong originally to man or to God? Or must God and
man litigate?
‘I too will something make
And joy in the making;
Altho’ to-morrow it seem
Like the empty words of a dream
Remembered on waking.’
‘I too’ can only mean that Dr. Bridges wishes to be classified as
neither God nor man. ‘And joy in the making’--by adding a new quality
to his proposed creation, not known to God or hasty man, Dr. Bridges
suggests an antithesis, i.e. ‘God and man make beauteous things and are
praised and honoured for them, but get no joy; I, on the other hand,
am determined to get joy, although the impermanence of my creations
gets me no praise or honour.’ The ‘dream remembered on waking’ is a
reminiscence of the seventy-third Psalm.
Of Rupert Brooke’s famous _England_ sonnet _If I should die think only
this of me_, and the remainder of that sequence, the final comment was
already made in April, 1915, by Charles Sorley, himself a soldier,
killed in action five months later. ‘I find it overpraised. He is
far too obsessed with his own sacrifice, regarding the going to war
of himself (and others) as a highly remarkable sacrificial exploit,
whereas it is merely the conduct demanded of him (and others) by the
turn of circumstances where noncompliance with this demand would have
made life intolerable. He has clothed his attitude in fine words; but
he has taken the sentimental attitude.... His early poems are his best.’
And what of Mr. Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’? It is his most anthologized
poem, one that has even been included by Dr. Bridges in his _Chilswell
Book of English Verse_ (a collection, by the way, that omits Donne,
Marvell, Vaughan, Marlowe, Skelton and the three Fletchers, for the
benefit of Newbolt, Moore, Lang, Longfellow, Arnold, Kipling, Campbell,
R. W. Dixon who has four, Scott who has six, Byron who has eight and
Tennyson who has ten pieces included).
‘Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine--’
Nineveh has possibly been linked up with the sea on Jonah’s account,
Mr. Masefield remembering that the prophet, afraid to pronounce doom
on Nineveh, took ship from Tarshish. But Nineveh is hundreds of miles
from Palestine, so why a quinquereme of Nineveh should row _home_ to
Palestine is mysterious. Let us charitably assume that by Nineveh Mr.
Masefield means Assyria; but though the Assyrians conquered Palestine
and held it for a while, Nineveh was not then the political centre
of their empire; moreover the Phœnicians, not the Assyrians, had
command of the Palestine coast; and anyhow the route from the land
of Ophir to Palestine before the days of the Suez Canal was one no
quinquereme could take unless it first casually circumnavigated
Africa--Hiram’s Phœnician fleet was sensibly built on the Red Sea with
Solomon’s right-of-way permission. And anyhow Nineveh had fallen before
quinqueremes were invented.
‘With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood and sweet white wine.’
The circumnavigation of Africa is here lengthened by a voyage to the
East Indies or perhaps Polynesia in search of sandalwood; but why these
Assyrio-Phœnicians were such fools as to go to Ophir (where the gold
came from) and to bring back not gold but cedarwood and wine, which
are among the chief riches of Palestine, we cannot well make out. The
ivory, apes and peacocks are clipped of course from the _Book of Kings_
but from a different chapter than the one dealing with Hiram: and they
then came sensibly cross-country with the Queen of Sheba. It is strange
how many of these perfect lyrics crib their effects from the Bible.
There is no finite verb in this stanza.
‘Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes.’
Cargo is rather a heavy term for this: consignment would be more
plausible. The cargo would have been something bulkier; for instance,
cotton, cacao, nuts, silver ingots, hard woods, Jesuits’ bark, and so
on. Oh, no, we see--
‘... cinnamon and gold moidores.’
Well, then the bulk of the cargo was cinnamon: the galleon was coming
home from the Isthmus of Panama (?) after unsuccessfully trying to
plant a cargo principally consisting of cinnamon (from Ceylon) on the
Mexicans. But why in the world were moidores among the cargo? Again
some unsuccessful commercial transaction is indicated. The Spaniards
took their chests of coined gold to the New World and were told,
‘No, thank you, we have plenty of that yellow metal here.’ Which so
chilled their stately hearts that they did not think of asking for some
ordinary unworked bars of gold in exchange for steel knives, guns and
other European manufactures. But they got the jewels all right, perhaps
in barter for a small amount of cinnamon; unless these also came from
the East Indies with the cinnamon. There is no finite verb in this
stanza either.
‘Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware and cheap tin trays.’
And still no finite verb; so we are evidently intended to hang up
these three nautical sketches on the wall and compare them. The main
differences in the three exhibits are as follows: Fig. 1, Oars;
Fig. 2, Sails; Fig. 3, Steam. Fig. 1 and Fig. 2, Romantic, scented
cargo, long calm voyages; Fig. 3, Prosaic cargo, short voyages, dull
travelling. The natural deductions to be drawn from these tabulated
contrasts can only be that improvements in methods of marine transport
do not necessarily make for long, pleasurable voyages. Which is not a
sublime thought; and we therefore look farther for a meaning of greater
subtlety. The Tyne coal and road-rails give the clue. Where was the
coaster taking them to in the _mad_ March days? Think a moment! Fig. 1,
Cedar and wine to Palestine; Fig. 2, Moidores to Spain. Fig. 3? Why, of
course, iron and coal back to Newcastle again after a rattling voyage
round the British isles; in the course of which the cheap tin trays
were re-imported into South Wales at a somewhat dearer price. And the
moral? Is it the ‘Changeless Mystery of the Sea’? Perhaps we may take a
couplet of Mr. Masefield’s scandalously out of its context and refer it
to the Sea:
‘All I have learned, and can learn, show me this:
How scant, how slight, my knowledge of her is.’
A frequently anthologized poem of Mr. Humbert Wolfe’s begins:
_Morning._
‘If all of us were doomed to die
When we had lived a minute,
I think I know what Anne and I
Would wish to happen in it.’
An archly expressed fancy which may be rationalized as follows: ‘If
a mysterious disease or functional failure were to destroy all human
beings one minute after birth, then I and Anne’--the poet’s daughter as
we read elsewhere--but of course there would not be a daughter Anne,
there would not be time, or Mr. Wolfe would have to waste several
seconds of his minute begetting her--anyhow ‘I and my daughter Anne,
mysteriously co-eval in babyhood, with our first comforters in our
mouths and our first swaddling clothes about us, would like to have
what happen?’
The poem continues:
‘We’d let our sixty seconds run
Where chestnut-blossoms harden
Some early morning, at Kensington,
When Spring is in the Gardens.’
And that is all. After all the agony of this tragical proposition we
are left with only an arithmetical formula, which we may be expected
to have already known--that one minute is the equivalent of sixty
seconds--and a little bit of mystical natural history which we could
not be expected to have already known. For chestnut-blossoms do not
really harden. The buds soften as they turn to blossom and the blossoms
soften further as they wither and fall off, and then the fruit hardens.
Whether or not this mysterious phenomenon, the hardening of the
blossom, is more noticeable in the Gardens in the early morning before
the gates open when Peter Pan is still piddling about on his lawful
errands, the context does not make clear.
Grammatically, the only conclusion is that these baby-folk, if put in
the unfortunate position of having to meet their God only sixty seconds
after having taken leave of Him, would choose to be born under a
spreading chestnut-tree and would spend their time each with one eye on
the second-hand of a watch, the other on the chestnut-blossom, to note
exactly how much hardening took place in their life-time of research.
They would then report their observations to St. Peter. But perhaps
what Mr. Wolfe really means is that if you let sixty seconds run, among
the perambulators, where the brain softens, some early morning at
Kensington, when spring is in the Gardens, you are likely to achieve a
perfect modern lyric.
Modern American anthology-pieces are not quite so successful as their
British counterparts, because the Free Verse movement has made it
difficult to use worn-out material in quite so hypnotic a manner, and
the true bad-vigour quality only comes with rhyme. Still, Mr. Sandburg
manages successfully enough in his ‘Cool Tombs.’
‘When Abraham Lincoln was shovelled into the tombs, he forgot the
copperheads and the assassin ... in the dust, in the cool tombs.’
‘Shovelled’ is intended as a confidential colloquialism, ‘tombs’ as
a poetical enlargement of singular into plural. But the colloquial
and the poetical obstruct each other: the verse reads as though poor
President Lincoln had been assassinated with dynamite and had to
be distributed with a shovel among the different state-cemeteries.
There, such as it is, the poem really ends, but it is protracted as an
anthology-piece by the old ballad device of three parallel statements
and a conclusion--‘I said it once, I say it again, what I say three
times’ (in slightly different ways) ‘is true.’
‘And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street,
cash and collateral turned ashes ... in the dust, in the cool
tombs.’
Sandburg here cites a second typical American citizen who has undergone
multiple burial. To complete the mystic trinity we must search out
an inevitable third to this great-hearted and hard-headed pair. John
Brown? Virginia Dare? Barbara Frietchie? Uncle Remus? Who else is a
dead American?
‘Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in
November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember? ...
in the dust, in the cool tombs?’
Evidently Pocahontas’ body (since Mr. Sandburg puts it as a question)
has a possible sense of memory which Lincoln and Grant (or their
bodies) lack. Is it because she was a woman and, though respectably
married, of middle age, and a mother, beautiful still? Or because she
was buried not in America but in a London church? It is interesting to
note as an example of the practical effect of the bad poem that there
has been a patriotic movement started for exhuming Pocahontas and
transferring her to America. Will she wonder? Will she hell! By this
time Carl Sandburg himself no longer remembers. Though he has not yet
been shovelled into the cool tombs.
‘Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries,
cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns ... tell
me if the lovers are losers ... tell me if any get more than the
lovers ... in the dust ... in the cool tombs.’
The question ‘Are the lovers losers?’ means just what? Losers in
comparison with the hero-cheerers and the grocery-buyers? Or losers in
comparison with Lincoln, Grant and Pocahontas? Or losers in regard to
love? The supplementary question is equally indistinct. Does it mean
‘Do any others get more than the lovers get when the lovers are in the
cool tombs?’ Or does it mean ‘Do any others get more than the lovers
get when they themselves are in the cool tombs?’ But the anthology
reader doesn’t mind; he is fagged out by his own cash and collaterals,
he is too weary to remember his Country’s heroes or even that women are
beautiful. In fact, he too might just as well be ... in the dust ... in
the cool tombs ... like Pocahontas, Carl Sandburg, and everybody else.
One of Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay’s most notorious anthology-pieces
begins:
‘I shall go back again to the bleak shore
And build a little shanty on the sand
In such a way that the extremest band
Of brittle seaweed will escape my door
But by a yard or two, and nevermore
Shall I return to take you by the hand.
I shall be gone to what I understand
And happier than I ever was before.’
This ends the octave of the sonnet. It is really extraordinary how many
poets, when feeling thoroughly low-spirited, revert to childhood and
think of going out into the wilder parts of the world and building a
_tiny tiny_ house JUST TO SHOW HOW I HATE YOU ALL, and how constantly
they choose to be near large sheets of water, not to drink or to wash
in, but just to give them that nice melancholy feeling that eighteenth-
and early nineteenth-century anthology lyricists used to get more
directly by crawling about in country graveyards. Miss Millay however
is more careful than Mr. Yeats in particularizing her little shanty.
She says nothing about it that sounds ridiculous except to those
frivolous readers who find her ‘brittle seaweed’ amusing just because
it is a piece of exact and cheerful natural history (‘the farther from
the sea, the more brittle is the seaweed found’) incongruous to the
atmosphere of bleak despair the poem is supposed to convey. Is the
brittle seaweed to serve as thatch for the shanty; as bedding; as food?
They trust not. Similarly they find Miss Millay’s careful calculation
of the neap-tide limit even more diverting than Mr. Yeats’ romances
about linnets and bean-rows. For ‘Inisfree’ might one day slowly settle
to the bottom of the lake--cabin, poet and all, or be engulfed by a
Piastre (not the Turkish coin, but the fabulous Irish lake-monster),
or spirited away by the Sidhe (pronounced ‘Shee’ in a footnote) to Hy
Brazil (where the nuts do not come from); and they wouldn’t laugh, or
not very much. But if one late September evening a big big BIG wave did
come and go splash against Miss Millay’s _tiny tiny_ house and she got
her shoes and stockings wet, and the fire was put out, and the roof
began to sag, now that would be something to laugh at.
‘The love that stood a moment in your eyes,
The words that lay a moment on your tongue
Are one with all that in a moment dies,
A little under-said and over-sung;
But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies
Unchanged from what they were when I was young.’
The poem, then, is apparently a rhetorical spite piece, a goodbye from
a woman to a man who has only loved her momentarily. Notwithstanding
her assurance that she is going to be happier than she ever was
before, we are not convinced that she really loves the sea or living
in a shanty on the seashore. (All she can see in this life is the
sullen rocks and skies and seaweed.) What she seems to want is to be
thoroughly miserable, so miserable that she’ll make him sorry, and
repentant; and perhaps he will come back. Our little lady, we begin to
feel, is just playing a game. She is teasing: she will build her shanty
so near the sea that she will always be on the verge of being washed
away, but always there the next morning to go on teasing. And the nasty
sandfleas that breed in the seaweed will come right in at her front
door and make her more miserable and him sorrier. But evidently she is
used to that, having lived in a little shanty when she was a child; or
perhaps in a converted hulk like Peggotty’s in _David Copperfield_. So
it is easier than it seems. She left her home early in life and went
to the city, perhaps, where she took him by the hand. And he liked
it for a little while, but then got tired: for she was only a simple
fisher-maid and they had nothing in common after all. What seems to
have happened is that she went on holding his hand; and he _said_ very
little and she _sang_ a great deal, too much, perhaps--he didn’t like
poetry and was really simpler than she. So she gave it up, or seemed to
give it up; and ran away, or seemed to run away. Or doesn’t the poem
mean this at all? Or what does it mean? Or isn’t it supposed to mean
anything? Or is it supposed to mean just anything, so that the reader
can make what he wants of it? And is this why it is a perfect lyric?
And what is a perfect lyric anyway?
There will be indignant protests against our treatment of these perfect
lyrics ‘as if they were prose’: for there is a popular superstition
that a poem, like the legendary female mind, is charming because it
is illogical; that it need not tally with itself (come out right),
or, as the Germans say in a single word which the English language
badly needs, that it need not ‘stimm.’ Whereas it is prose which does
not need to stimm, or needs to stimm only in a few directions: it
can use dead metaphors, toy with false analogies, and can record a
succession of events bound together only by space or time propinquity.
It describes something; it does not make something. So that any means
by which it may strengthen the description will pass. It is the idea
not the thing itself that matters. Poetry must stimm in all directions:
every metaphor must be alive and reconciled to its neighbours;
analogies must work out precisely; its events must have so complete
interdependence that a single idle word would spoil the cohesion
of a poem. Poets unable to make everything ‘stimm’ conceal their
shortcomings in a facile artistry. Indeed, a cleverly metrified poem is
scarcely asked to stimm even in an elementary prose sense, let alone in
a poetic sense.
Chapter VI
‘BEST POEMS’
The expressed critical aim of the anthology has come to be the sifting
out of the ‘best poems.’ And the material used by the anthologist has
come to be poems written especially to supply the demand for them. His
‘best poem’ is the best of a best-poem type. We have then two general
classes into which poems fall, the best-poem class, including good and
bad ‘best poems,’ and the large indefinable class of poems not of the
best-poem type. This latter class is left largely to its own fate.
But certain kindly provisions are made for the most deserving of the
rejected ‘best poems’. Many find their way into Fireside Anthologies,
consoled by the company of a few decrepit veterans, such as Lamb’s _Old
Familiar Faces_ and Hood’s _Song of the Shirt_. An ingenious way of
disposing of them has been employed by Mr. C. Lewis Hind in his volume
_One Hundred Second Best Poems_. He begins well by discussing the
Fireside poem, the poem that makes an irresistible appeal to the heart
of the great uneducated public and is always asking for its author and
for missing lines in the literary pages of the Sunday papers. A good
example he gives is Cecil Frances Alexander’s:
‘By Nebo’s lonely mountain
On this side Jordan’s wave,
In a vale in the land of Moab
There lies a lonely grave ...’;
and Charlotte Bickersteth Ward’s:
‘Child of My Love, lean hard
And let me feel the pressure of thy care.
I know thy burden, child; I shapèd it ...’ etc.;
and Thomas Bayly’s:
‘She wore a wreath of roses that night when first we met:
Her lovely face was smiling beneath her curls of jet.’
But these typical instances of parlour verse are curiously confused
with vigorous old rhymes which are not in the competitive best-poem
tradition at all:
‘’Tis well to be merry and wise,
’Tis well to be honest and true,
’Tis well to be off with the old love
Before you are on with the new’;
and
‘’Tis a very good world to live in,
To lend or to spend or to give in,
But to beg or to borrow or get a man’s own
’Tis the very worst world that ever was known’;
and
‘Love me little, love me long
Is the burden of my song.
Love that is too hot and strong
Burneth soon to waste.
Still, I would not have thee cold,
Not too backward or too bold:
Love that lasteth till ’tis old
Fadeth not in haste....’
Why these are here classified as second-best rather than best poems is
that they were not written for the sophisticated ‘best’ reader: Mr.
Hind therefore includes them, disregarding their quality, in the hope
that they will vulgarly please the second-best reader. But even in his
well-meaning snobbery he is not consistently generous in giving his
public what it wants. For he has funked putting in Sir Henry Newbolt’s
_Play up! play up! and play the game_ and Mr. Kipling’s _If_ and
Wordsworth’s _We are Seven_; the first, as he admits, because he hadn’t
the courage, the second because ‘Kipling--is Kipling,’ and Wordsworth’s
_We are Seven_ because Wordsworth is ‘among the Immortals.’ No such
courtesy prevented him from including Sidney Dobell’s _Tommy’s Dead_,
a poem rather marred in the making but not a second-best poem or yet
a ‘best,’ and one by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet who sometimes
makes Wordsworth look like a real second-best poet; nor from setting
the unpretentious Negro spiritual _Swing low, sweet Chariot_ side
by side with the farcical wedding-hymn of Mrs. Gurney’s _O perfect
Love, all human thought transcending_. Mr. Hind closes his preface
by saying that, after all, since a Second Best Poem is one that the
reader likes not because he has been told to but because he really
does, a few of the one hundred examples of _Second Best Poems_ should
be really included in an anthology of Best Poems. In other words, Mr.
Hind suggests, though the anthologist’s first object is to flatter his
readers that they are ‘best’ readers, they should perhaps be made a
little comfortable with a few real favourites, such as:
‘God and I in space alone
And Nobody else in view.’
He has given away the secret that the ‘best’ reader is a homely
second-best reader at heart.
The point about Best and Second Best is really this (and we are
grateful to Mr. Hind for illustrating it so conclusively), that though
poetry which submits to a public standard may be appropriately judged
by this standard and given blue and red tickets as first-class and
second-class, for poetry that is not thus dapperly professional there
must be a separate standard for each poem, a standard supplied by the
poem itself. Now, the anthology standard would be convenient and just
if applied only to poems which properly fall under it. It serves for
the sub-logical ‘best poem’ (the perfect modern lyric), which is held
together by pseudo-magical sleight-of-pen; and for the ‘best poem’
which is held together by common prose logic. Take, for example,
Kipling’s _If_. As M. André Maurois has shown, it translates easily
into French and makes a better poem there than in English. Therefore,
since French poetry is inflated prose,[10] _If_ must have originally
been in English a mere prose fancy without any poetic construction;
therefore again, a poem to which the ‘best poem’ standard may properly
apply itself--a professional effort. But by applying itself to _all_
poems this standard is capable of classifying as first-class a poem
which is not professionally classifiable: as with Wordsworth’s poem
on the death of Lucy, which, though rated as first-class, should in
all justice rather be put out of the running. Because of its subject,
because of its picturesque last two lines, and because it was written
by Wordsworth, however, it is generally included in most _Best Poems_
anthologies:
‘A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
‘No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.’
As a prose fancy this poem is confused and illogical; and if it were
translated into French it would be no poem at all. The contrast between
Lucy’s once active evasion of the touch of earthly years and her
present passive acquiescence in earth’s diurnal course is the main
argument. But from the prose view it may be facetiously pointed out
that Lucy never in her most active days could have gone to counteract
the daily rolling of the earth. The details are even more illogical
than the main argument. Apparently what Wordsworth has in his mind
is that ‘I thought once that she was non-human in a spiritual sense,
but now she is dead I find her non-human in the very opposite sense.’
But all the words have got misplaced. ‘Spirit’ has got attached to
Wordsworth when it should go with Lucy; ‘no human’ likewise. There is a
false comparison made between ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ and ‘She
neither hears nor sees.’ ‘Trees’ is an irrelevant climax to ‘rocks and
stones.’ ‘Thing’ should not qualify the first Lucy but should be with
the second Lucy among the rocks and stones. As a French poem it would
run, more logically, something like this:
‘A slumber sealed my _human fears_
For her mortality:
Methought _her spirit_ could withstand
The touch of earthly years.
‘Yet now her spirit fails, she is
Less sentient than a _tree_,
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks and stones and _things_.’
Indeed, if we could get the rhymes to match the revised sense, this
could properly be rated, according to the ‘best poem’ standard,
as a first-class poem. The fact is, this poem, judged by its own
idiosyncratic standard, has great uncanonical beauty: it is not
logical, but neither is it sub-logical. The poet has not induced a
professionally confused, clap-trap frame of mind in which to write a
fitting (but false) poem like Jonson’s _Epitaph on the Dowager Countess
of Pembroke_. He is obviously writing a private, not a public poem,
which is under no obligation to be taphologically fitting. It has
rather a supra-logical harmony, by identity of the theme, which shows
the inability of the mind to face the actual reality of death, with the
expression, which shows an inability to get the right words to pair off
in a logical prose manner. Had the mind been able to face lyrically
the fact of Lucy’s death and had the words been illogically placed;
or had the mind not been able to face the fact and had the words been
logically placed--it would not have been as true a poem as it now is
in its distortion. That is, though at first we may judge the poem as
bad because it is not ‘the best words _in the best order_,’ according
to Coleridge’s definition, the _best order_ in the logical prose sense
would have been as false here as a more professional disorder. A poem
like this, then, slight as it is, and false as the bulk of Wordsworth’s
work is, should not be submitted to the indignity of being put in
company with Kipling’s _If_, on the one hand, or Jonson’s _Epitaph_ on
the other.[11]
The anthology-habit betrays anthologists into cataloguing even
poets who never entered their poems for literary competition. So
Mr. Louis Untermeyer, in his _Modern American Poetry_, prints large
quantities of Emily Dickinson, who avoided publishing anything in
her life-time, and calls her ‘possibly the greatest woman-poet,’
‘of the colossal substance of Immortality.’ He says that she wrote
chiefly on four topics, ‘Love, Nature, Life, Death,’ and agrees with
another critic, Mr. Aiken, that she was incorrigibly perverse in her
refusal of the accepted technique of verse, that ‘_one even suspects
that these lapses were deliberate_’ (!!). Mr. Untermeyer deals in
much the same way in his _Modern British Poetry_ with Gerard Manley
Hopkins, who was as reserved and even secretive about his poems as
Emily Dickinson; no poem of his appearing until thirty years after
his death. He finds in Hopkins ‘verbal excesses, irritating oddities’
and agrees with Dr. Bridges, Hopkins’ editor, that ‘the beauty in
his least peculiar poems makes it lamentable that he died when to
judge by his latest work he was beginning to castigate his art into a
more reserved style.... For even in the cloudiest of his poems there
is a splendour, a rush of rhyme, a cataract of colour attained by
_scarcely any of his clearer-speaking contemporaries_.’ Mr. Hind showed
a clumsy appreciation of Hopkins’ proud shyness in hiding him among
the Second Best poems. Mr. Untermeyer, who is a business-man rather
than a sentimentalist, pulls him out on the Best Poem stage and makes
him yield Best Poem returns. But though the anthologist can exploit
almost any material to his ends, he prefers regular best-poem talent.
He wants intelligence, not genius. In comparison with talented writing
most works of genius are unintelligent from the anthology viewpoint.
And as so many people nowadays have intelligence and, having it, use it
to their profit, the anthologist is not obliged to make many raids on
genius.
Perhaps the first test of talent in the anthology lyricist is whether
he can do his turn in no less than eight and no more than thirty
lines--the daily newspaper and the weekly literary journal are the
trying-out places. For the more solid ‘best poem’ a longer unit is
stipulated, from about fifty to two hundred lines; and the trying-out
places for these are the academic monthlies and quarterlies. This
latter type is the declamatory as opposed to the lyrical poem; it takes
a central argument through a number of rhetorical digressions and
clinches it with a felicitous lyrical summary. It is sober, deliberate
oratory rather than light-headed variety--the dull, weighty parts of
the anthology programme. Whether ode, elegy, descriptive or narrative
verse or philosophic disquisition, the method is the same: ‘_le flot
oratoire roule sur la pente de la logique_.’[12] An exercise in this
type might be helpful.
The title proposed is a fine eye-taker--‘He Died To-day.’ The subject
is a scrap of a clay pot recently found by archæologists in the sands
of Egypt, and dating about A.D. 300. It was apparently sent by a runner
as a sort of telegram between two unknown persons. It says simply
‘He died to-day,’ and may be found in the Bodleian Library at Oxford
exposed in a glass case.
This makes an ideal subject for a long anthology poem. There is in
it the suppressed story element referable to the reader and waiting
to be enlarged in the manner of Edwin Arlington Robinson in his _Man
against the Sky_. (Who was he? Where was he going? Was he really a man?
Could it have been this? Or that? Or the other? And then the end.) The
central argument is: ‘Here is Death; a brief, poignant message that
does not actually hurt you because it is remote in time and place, yet
a symbol of the Universal Sorrows of Man, so that it may stand for a
tragedy of yours that is not poignant to other people. How little do we
know of other people’s affairs, and yet how much: even after a lapse of
centuries!’
The scheme is the same, whatever the period-mannerisms. The
introductory stanza would run ‘I loitered in a dim Museum when suddenly
my wandering eye, etc., etc. I felt chill, etc., etc. And walking home
through the quiet streets I asked myself: “Who was he?” ... when
to-day ...
‘... to-day is always to-day ...
... Clay is always clay ...’
And you go on to say (in the second stanza): ‘Who sent the message to
whom?’
... ‘Perhaps’ (in the third stanza) ‘it was a dissolute Alexandrian
waiting for the death of his rich uncle, now sending this joyful
message to his creditors or to his mistress.’
‘Perhaps’ (the fourth stanza) ‘it was a new-born child; his nurse sent
this message to his absent father.’
‘Perhaps’ (the fifth stanza) ‘a wife sent this message to the mistress
of her husband, who was about to desert her. Perhaps she poisoned him
in jealousy.’
‘Perhaps’ (the sixth stanza) ‘it was sent by the Master of the Prison
to a man’s wife, when she sent him the Pardon that she had got from the
Governor at the price of her chastity.’
‘Perhaps’ (the seventh stanza) ‘it was sent by the Merchant to the
mother of his apprentice, an only son. She had heard a rumour that
the lad was killed falling from a ladder three weeks before. He died
_to-day_.’ (!!!)
This last ‘perhaps,’ being dramatically the most effective, may end the
sequence. In the eighth stanza comes the lyrical summary.
Now cast this subject in its simplest possible form: for instance use
the nearest Western equivalent to the _hokku_, the most usual short
form in Japanese anthologies. The _hokku_ has only seventeen syllables
and is arranged in lines of five, seven, and five syllables apiece.
Something like this:
THE ARCHÆOLOGIST
A shard of Nile clay
I found, in haste antiquely
Scrawled ‘He died to-day.’
And we have the bare but adequate poetical sketch to which our
hypothetical ‘best poem’ may be reduced--the least exceptionable
inflation of the original prose idea.
Now to consider an actual longish ‘best poem.’ A subject that
immediately occurs is Wordsworth’s _Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood_, which Hallam thought ‘perhaps the
most perfect ode in the English language’:
‘The rainbow comes and goes
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair:
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth.’
The prose idea is fully contained in the title; what is the legitimate
length of the poetical sketch? In this stanza, whose verbose
mock-simplicity is typical of all the other stanzas, we have a topic
last line (an inflated quotation from the Old Testament) qualified
by five parallel poetical commonplaces. One such would have made the
stanza merely a ‘lyrical’ passage; five puff it into philosophy. Or if
Wordsworth had set himself the task of rendering an honest poetical
sketch of his prose idea, he could have justified one of these
commonplaces in the clear antithesis it established between itself
and the topic line. But the relevancy of ‘The sunshine is a glorious
birth,’ for example, is compromised in advance by the sentimental
dishonesty of the six preceding lines and further by the make-weight
line following it. If we had the sunshine line by itself ‘birth’ would
have to go, no longer supported by the general confusion of the coming
and going rainbow and the constant rose and the bare heavens on a
moony night and the fair waters and the beautiful waters on a starry
night--in which it passes unchallenged; or if it remained it would have
to square itself with ‘passed away’ by an acknowledgment of the fact
that sunshine passes away, and also that it is renewed; it could not
at any rate stand as an idle word. In the same way ‘glorious’ would
have to go, as merely the end flourish of a promiscuous adjectival
sequence; unless it squared itself accurately with ‘glory.’ This may
seem a somewhat wanton and futile indictment of a well-entrenched ‘best
poem.’ If it were patiently sustained throughout the whole poem, if
all rhetorical falsities were struck out, all gratuitous cataloguing,
all irrelevant conceits and all plagiarisms, very little, it is true,
would get by. The point of disagreement is, whether or not it is better
to pass over the solecisms of our ‘best’ poetry in order to have any
poetry at all. Granted even that we were anxious to save what we could,
just for the sake of having poetry, and that it were possible here to
rescue the poem from the solid masonry of imitation Milton and Dryden
in which it is immured, the result would probably be another Vaughan’s
_The Retreate_--or rather _The Retreate_ in sixteen lines instead of
thirty-two.
Or take Milton’s _Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity_. Here are
two typical stanzas:
‘And sullen Moloch, fled,
Hath left in shadows dread
His burning idol all of blackest hue;
In vain with cymbals’ ring
They call the grisly king,
In dismal dance about the furnace blue;
The brutish gods of Nile as fast,
Isis, and Orus, and the dog Anubis, haste.
‘Nor is Osiris seen
In Memphian grove or green,
Trampling the unshowered grass with lowings loud,
Nor can he be at rest
Within his sacred chest;
Nought but profoundest Hell can be his shroud;
In vain, with timbrelled anthems dark
The sable-stolèd sorcerers bear his worshipped ark.’
Milton is a more finished orator than Wordsworth; but underneath the
swaddlings of mythological quaintness there is to be found only a
rather tuneless Christmas carol. The first stanza makes it quite plain
what Milton was at:
‘... Nature in awe to Him
Had doffed her gaudy trim,
With her great Master so to sympathize.
It was no season then for her
To wanton with the Sun, her lusty paramour.’
Occasionally an oratorical ‘best’ poem appears in lyric length, as T.
E. Brown’s ten-line _My Garden_:
‘A Garden is a lovesome thing, God wot.
Rose plot,
Fringed pool,
Ferned grot--
The veriest school
Of peace; and yet the fool
Contends that God is not--
Not God! in gardens! when the eve is cool?
Nay, but I have a sign.
’Tis very sure God walks in mine.’
This might be hokku’d into:
‘There is no God.’ ‘Fool!
He walks my lovesome garden
In the evening cool.’
From which, if we were not interested in saving the pieces, just for
the sake of having poetry, it could be coué’d away altogether, God wot.
Chapter VII
POETRY AND ANTHOLOGY LABELS
The salad-mixing of a popular anthology is intended to give the reader
a composite picture of the poetic world. There must be flowers, birds,
landscapes, and in contrast a few grim glimpses of urban life, and
a balanced representation of emotions new and old. A lark-poem, for
instance, would be included not because it was a good poem but because
it was a good poem about a lark. It would be chosen not so much as
a particularly distinguished contribution by a given author as a
particularly distinguished example from a hypothetical lark-anthology.
Imagine such a lark-anthology, compiled, say, by Mr. Hartog as a
companion volume to his _Kiss in Poetry_. Let us give him a start with
the ancient Irish _Song of Summer_:
‘... A timorous, tiny, persistent little fellow
Sings at the top of his voice,
The lark sings clear tidings.
Surpassing summer time of delicate hues!’
Skelton’s
‘The lark with his long toe,
The spink, the martinet also.’
Lyly’s
‘what is’t now we hear?
None but the lark so shrill and clear,
How at heaven’s gate she claps her wings!’
Shakespeare’s
‘Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings!’
Henry Lawes’
‘Swift through the yielding air I glide.
... Teach the young lark his lesson out,
Who early as the day is born
Sings his shrill anthem to the rising corn.’
Pope’s lines from _Windsor Forest_:
‘He lifts a tube and levels with his eye.
Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky.
Oft as the mounting larks their notes prepare
They fall and leave their little lives in air.’
Wordsworth’s
‘Mount, daring warbler ...’
and
‘They pay the price who soar but never roam,
True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home’;
and his earlier _Up With Me!_ in which the lark is called the ‘drunken
lark’ and made a symbol of irresponsible gladness;
Shelley’s
‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit,
Bird thou never wert ...’
Clare’s ‘_Above the russet clods ..._’ ending
‘... Oh, were they but a bird!
So think they, while they listen to its song
And smile and fancy and so pass along:
While its low nest, moist with the dews of morn,
Lies safely, with the leveret, in the corn.’
The lark-anthology is well on its way already. But when it is done
what has it accomplished? Nothing except to collect a stock of larks
for future popular anthologists to turn over in search of a suitable
specimen for their Composite Poetic World. There is no common factor
in these poems except the word ‘lark’: it would be as reasonable to
garner all the poems beginning ‘There is a ...’ e.g. ‘There is a
flower, the lesser Celandine’; ‘There is a garden in her face’; ‘There
is a lady sweet and kind’; ‘There is a glory on the apple-boughs’;
‘There is a pigeon in the apple-tree’; ‘There is a sweet music here
that softer falls.’ Indeed the ‘There is a ...’ poems are probably more
closely allied than the lark poems. All that one can get from the
lark-anthology is a number of critical notes such as that in ancient
Ireland the lark was not yet a literary bird, nor in England in the
reign of Henry VIII, but grew so in Elizabethan times; that Shakespeare
in need of a song for one of his comedies was not above stealing from
Lyly; that the seventeenth century made the lark purely literary; that
the eighteenth century had less feeling for birds as birds than even
the seventeenth, regarding them alternately as food and incidental
music; that the early nineteenth century sentimentalized the lark as a
moral or philosophical symbol, and paid no attention to the reminder of
a man like Clare, who knew larks personally and not through literature,
that after all larks were larks (as they had been in ancient Ireland).
It is a socio-literary-critical work, not a book of poems.
Poetry has no intrinsic categories, though for its arrangement in
volume form the author-category is obviously necessary; or, in the
case of fugitive poetry, the period-category. The author-category,
however, is made to support the anthology-system if the author can
possibly be represented as a specialist in some poetic department.
The period-category is generally perverted in the same sort of way to
exploit some specialized historical appeal. Thus Mr. Norman Ault’s
_Elizabethan Lyrics_ might have passed as a legitimate anthology
if it had merely included loose anonymous and virtually anonymous
pieces strictly of the Elizabethan Period. Likewise Mr. Massingham’s
_Seventeenth Century English Verse_, which contains a number of
fugitive pieces for which we can be very grateful, such as:
‘Hic jacet John Shorthose,
Sine hose, sine shoes, sine breeches:
Qui fuit, dum vixit,
Sine goods, sine lands, sine riches’;
and the catch:
‘The Wise Men were but seven, ne’er more shall be for me.
The Muses were but nine, the Worthies three times three,
And three merry boys, and three merry boys are we.’
Between Mr. Ault’s period (1558–1603) and Mr. Massingham’s period
(1600–1700) there is only a Debatable-land of three years: that is,
if each had made a true anthology of his set period they would have
together tidied up the poetic scraps of a century and a half. But Mr.
Ault reaches anthologistically forward to William Basse’s panegyric on
Shakespeare, written in 1616, which also appears in Mr. Massingham’s
book; and Mr. Massingham reaches anthologistically back to Donne
for love poems like ‘Go and catch a falling star!’ that he wrote
in the 1590’s and which are also used by Mr. Ault. ‘Period’ to the
anthologist is an appealing trade label rather than a genuine means of
classification.
The political category is a refinement of the period-category. Morley’s
_The King and the Commons_ is an anthology of Cavalier and Puritan
pieces, divided up like a game of French-and-English, with Milton,
Marvell, Wither, Bunyan on one side, and Suckling, Crashaw, Davenant,
Waller on the other. Marvell--to point to only one discrepancy--could
only be properly represented in a political anthology by both Roundhead
and Royalist pieces. He kept on good terms with Cromwell, but remained
independent. His _Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland_
is more Royalist, indeed, than Puritan. But the joke turns against
the anthologist not the poet when we find Marvell’s ‘To make a final
conquest of all me’ and Wither’s ‘Shall I, wasting in despair’
registered as Puritan poems.
Next, the ethnological category. We have Mrs. Sharp’s _Lyra
Celtica_[13] built up on a popular theory of the consanguinity
of Bretons, Manx, Cornish, Irish, Scots, Welsh: which are now
distinguishable as racially either P Celt (Brythonic) or Q Celt
(Goidelic)--two very antipathetic races--or casual mixtures of these
and other races. Even as a muddled survey of muddled P and Q there
might be scientific justification for _Lyra Celtica_, leaving poetry
out of the question: but an unfortunate desire for symmetry led the
editor to fatten the Manx section with what she calls ‘Anglo-Celts’
like T. E. Brown and Sir Hall Caine, and the Cornish with Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch and Riccardo Stephens. These in the same book with
Deirdre’s _Lament for the Sons of Usnach_ and Taliesin’s _Song of the
Wind_! Ethnology is clearly too complicated to provide a criticism for
poetry and poetry too complicated to provide a criticism for ethnology.
But pseudo-ethnology of the Pan-Celtic type agrees well enough with
the anthology-system, which is as crude a caricature of poetry as such
movements are of ethnology.
The regional category of poetry returns as twisted an image as the
pseudo-ethnological category. A poet is not a poet because of his
origin, nor even a special kind of poet because he has had a special
kind of origin. So long as the language used is more or less the same
there may be a greater affinity between a poet born and living in, say,
Dayton, Ohio, who is not wilfully Daytonian, and a poet born and living
in, say, Oxford, but not wilfully Oxonian, than between the former
and any Dayton-proud poet, or between the latter and any Oxford-proud
poet. The only excuse for a regional anthology is where the language
and psychology of the region selected varies very considerably from
those of other regions, and where an accumulation of uncollected poetry
exists which may be regarded as the product of the region rather than
of individual poets. For instance, ‘Manchester Poetry’ is a false
category because it implies that there is an inherent cultural force in
Manchester that absorbs individual authorship and that enables one to
distinguish a Manchester poem from one composed in Liverpool. Whereas
the reason of such an anthology would only be that the commercial
enterprise of Manchester is expected to make the anthology saleable
in two or three editions. Northern English as opposed to Southern
English poetry is a different matter: poetry composed in Northern
English (usually called ‘Scots’) by people to whom Southern English is
not the ordinary spoken language, is very different in character from
Southern English poetry; and this difference is most clearly marked
in the fugitive and anonymous pieces for which the anthology is the
natural home. The following rhyme, even though transposed into Southern
English, betrays its origin at once:
‘There was a piper had a cow
And had no hay to give her:
He played a tune upon his pipes
“Consider, old cow, consider!”
‘That old cow considered well
And promised the piper money,
Would he but play his other tune
“Corn Rigs are bonny.”’
Whereas the following verses by Miss Elinor Wylie, an American writer,
are only Northern English in decoration--Southern English in feeling:
‘Now haud your tongue, ye haverin’ coward,
For whilst I’m young I’ll go flounced and flowered,
In lutestring striped like the strings o’ a fiddle,
Wi’ gowden girdles aboot my middle.
‘My silks are stiff wi’ patterns o’ siller,
I’ve an ermine hood like the hat o’ a miller,
I’ve chains o’ coral like rowan berries,
An’ a cramoisie mantle that cam’ frae Paris.’
Before compiling an anthology of dialect poetry a careful distinction
must be made between dialect by inheritance and dialect by sentimental
adoption. Mr. John Buchan’s _Northern Muse_ succeeds well enough in
including poems only Northern English by inheritance. But it also
includes poems by Scott, Stevenson and others to whom, though Scots by
birth, Southern English was the normal literary language; and poems
by other well-known authors, such as Burns, whose works stand by
themselves and should not be (as in the disfiguring subject-category
employed by Mr. Buchan) set side by side with poems by authors
whose works could not stand by themselves, or with the anonymous
anthology-pieces in which Northern English is very rich. Of these _The
Northern Muse_ contains so many that the faults which it shares with
all popular anthologies are more easily forgiven. Here are two pieces
from _The Northern Muse_:
‘Kiss’d yestreen and kiss’d yestreen
Up the Gallowgate, down the Green:
I’ve woo’d wi’ lords, and woo’d wi’ lairds,
I’ve mool’d wi’ carles and mell’d wi’ cairds,
I’ve kiss’d wi’ priests--’twas done i’ the dark
Twice in my gown and thrice in my sark;
But priest nor lord nor loon can gie
Sic kindly kisses as he gae me’;
and
‘Happy the craw
That biggs in the Trotten shaw
And drinks o’ the Water o’ Dye--
For nae mair may I.’
Much the same may be said about Mr. Padraic Colum’s _Anthology of Irish
Verse_, which is well-edited, with notes, and is intended to call
attention to the qualities characteristic of Anglo-Irish verse. Mr.
Colum likewise makes use of subject-categories, mixes the individual
with the not strongly individual poets, and sets the work of men like
Moore and Swift, to whom Southern English was the normal literary
language, next to popular ballads like _The Night before Larry was
Stretched_, _The Peeler and the Goat_, _The Shan Van Vocht_, and _I
know my love by his way of walking_.
The regional label is to be as much distrusted in American poetry
as in English. One of the first propagandist acts of statehood is
to take stock of state-poets and marshal them in an anthology. The
only qualification for inclusion is a six-months’ residence in the
state: no doubt if poetry were financially more profitable there would
be the same heavy transfer fees and bribes as are paid in American
professional baseball (and English professional football). The usual
anthology of Californian poets, for instance, begins with Edwin Markham
who, though Oregon-born, did spend the first part of his life in
California in the pioneering days, continues with George Sterling, who
only came to California in 1895 at the age of twenty-six, and finishes
with a batch of younger writers, many non-Californian, who attended
Mr. Witter Bynner’s class in verse-writing at the University of
California--Mr. Bynner being a product of Harvard. Even Edwin Markham,
however, never wrote verse that was in any sense Californian; except
for a few casual references his early poems might have been written
almost anywhere--even in Staten Island, his home for twenty-five
years. His commonplace humanitarianism comes strangely from the most
boisterously plutocratic, commercially freakish and cruelly reactionary
state in the Union. George Sterling’s Victorianism belonged neither
to old-world San Francisco nor to new-world Hollywood. Younger
‘California’ poets might be just as fittingly classified as New York
City nature poets, Chicago bums, Iowan or Virginian lyricists or
Tennessee metaphysicians: on the assumption that it is not possible to
get to one state without travelling through most of the others, and
that all Americans are always travelling. And California, for poets
as for prospective film stars, must be the shortest stop-over in the
world. Californian poetry magazines are generally filled with the
work of Easterners, Southerners and Middle Westerners who have failed
with the Eastern, Southern or Middle Western magazines, or who wish
to branch out, or by Westerners who can’t get a hold in the Eastern,
Southern, Middle Western magazines. But what is a Westerner?[14] Merely
someone who happens to be living in the West. In California a pedigreed
‘native’ son or daughter is an esteemed curiosity; and in the other
Western States native sons and daughters are taught to sing at State
universities predominantly staffed or inspired by the cosmopolitan East.
As Californian poetry is only inferior American poetry, so modern negro
poetry so labelled is only inferior white poetry. Mr. Countée Cullen,
the youngest and most sentimentally advertised of contemporary negro
poets, writes just a little worse than the usual versifying white
undergraduate. The negro was perhaps the one American population-unit
with a just claim to a spiritual regionalism. But he whitened himself
in order to be able to express his blackness; and so was left with
nothing to express. Or else he cynically blackened his blackness in
order to bring a few material comforts into his spiritual region; and
so became a white man’s negro, a burnt-cork minstrel.
Separate regional portfolios, then, should be only allowed where the
regional idiom is unmistakable, and used for fugitive pieces only.
As soon as the regional flavour undergoes literary diffusion--as,
for example, when the industrialization of the South destroyed its
eccentric provincial culture--the regional category must be abandoned
by the conscientious anthologist. Local sentiment nowadays (except in
the case of local units too insignificant and too mute to be gathered
in by time) is either a dingy hangover from the past or commercial
opportunism or journalistic opportunism or the dissatisfaction of
a group of literary theorists with vulgar literary diffusion. A
stock-label, in fact, is only too often the mark of an inferior poet,
or of an inferior critic. It may mean, as with the label ‘peasant-poet’
or ‘poetess,’ that there is no more to be said about the work than
that it was written by a peasant, or by a woman. But it may also mean,
on the other hand, that the critic is either weakly or maliciously
shirking his responsibilities; if John Clare, say, is dismissed as a
peasant or Edith Sitwell as a woman; or if a woman critic dismissed
_all_ men poets as men.
Certain terms might seem justifiable as a necessary part of the
anthologist’s critical apparatus, where they contributed to the
accuracy of his definition of a poet’s work. Yet even the respectable
term ‘metaphysical’ falls among the cant labels. Though it might be
used, without prejudice, to suggest by simple analogy that the poet’s
method resembled the metaphysician’s in its analytical thoroughness
and in its almost business-like seriousness, as a matter of fact it
generally expresses a critic’s irritation with a poet too difficult
for his poor powers, such as Johnson’s irritation with Donne, or his
self-congratulatory satisfaction with a poet difficult enough for his
large powers, such as Eliot’s satisfaction with Donne. In neither
case is ‘metaphysical’ a disinterested critical term: a disinterested
critical term is concentrated on the work rather than on the critic,
whose job it is (if he wants the job) to describe, not to enjoy
himself. So an anthology of metaphysical verse would be a flattering
assemblage of light conceits, heavy philosophizings, airy speculations,
dreary finalities--in which Mr. Eliot for one would set Donne and Poe
side by side to be conversationally incomprehensible to each other. To
make such an anthology possible it would have to be disregarded (and
an anthologist could disregard it quickly enough) that ‘metaphysical’
is critically meaningless except as a term of simple analogy--that
poetry and metaphysics are professionally incompatible. The object of a
professional metaphysician is to talk without saying anything. A poet’s
object is to talk and say something. An anthology of metaphysical verse
would therefore consist of those poems or fragments of poems which, its
editor would be proud to say, meant nothing to him.
‘Mystical’ would seem to be more easily sustainable as an anthology
label, the analogy between poetic mystical experience and religious
mystical experience being fairly close and a strong sympathy rather
than a strong incompatibility existing between the two processes: here
indeed is an accurate term all ready-made for the anthologist with
critical pretensions. But as a critic he must maintain his prestige
by begging criticism: if critics were really to practise criticism
they would reveal it to be a matter of library routine rather than of
belles-lettres. So with ‘mystical’ verse: the anthologist shirks the
responsibility of applying his term accurately as at once too laborious
and too humble. The preface to the _Oxford Book of Mystical Verse_
reads:
‘In sending out this anthology we have no desire to venture on a
definition of what actually constitutes mysticism and what does
not, since such an attempt would be clearly outside our province.
But ... we have been governed in making our selection by a desire
to include only such poems and extracts from poems as contain
intimations of a consciousness wider and deeper than the normal.
‘That is the connecting link between them--the thread, as it were,
on which the individual pieces are strung....
‘Our attempt has been to steer between ... uninspired piety on the
one hand and mere intellectual speculation on the other.’
And we get a few truly mystical poets, such as Richard Rolle, Vaughan,
Traherne and Phineas Fletcher, introducing Victorian dead-heads and
living sapheads who have played with mystic-making at the same time
as they have played with poetry-making. As Alice Meynell wrote in a
preface to another not much better ‘mystical’ anthology, _The Mount of
Vision_ (which, however, she did not compile):
‘It is ominous to hear the name of mysticism so easily used, given
and taken without a thought of its cost. Visions are thought
easy to come by, and revelations and such extreme things as “the
unitive life”--things for which the Saints thought fifty years of
self-conquest and self-abandonment a paltry price--are discussed
as incidents of well-read aspiration: with no mention of the first
step, much chatter of the last.’
Now in a larger sense than merely Christian mysticism, with its implied
asceticism and retreat, there is in a poetic sense the mysticism which
the editors of the _Oxford Book of Mystical Verse_ have defined as
‘intimations of a consciousness wider and deeper than the normal’; yet
though concessions are here made to other non-saintly and gross-feeding
poets, such as Tennyson, Emerson, Browning, Swinburne and Matthew
Arnold, there is not a line of Shakespeare’s given--not even his
_Phœnix and Turtle_, which is obscure enough and passionate enough for
the editors to have passed off as even Christian mysticism. From the
end of the seventeenth century onward, with the exception of Blake,
Hopkins and Francis Thompson, who were religious persons and also
poets, the collection consists almost wholly of the library-Victorians
just listed as discovered writing sentimentally about religion, and
dozens of dim little people, chiefly Anglo-Catholics, hiding their
dimness and littleness behind the bright capital-letters of Mystery,
Eternity, King of Kings, Perfect Soul, Immortal Truth, Body, Word,
Dwelling, Watcher, Night, God. There are many styles; these are typical
openings:
‘The Lion, he prowleth far and near
Nor swerves for pain or rue ...
And a little Lamb with aching Feet,
He prowleth too ...’
_Ruth Lindsay._
‘Before me grew the human soul,
And, after I am dead and gone,
Through grades of effort and control
The marvellous work shall still go on ...’
_Archibald Lampmann._
‘Snowflakes downfloating from the void
Upon my face,
Spilth of the silent alchemy employed
In deeps of space ...’
_Walter Wilmshurt._
‘_The Voice of a Man_
What of the Night, O Watcher?
_The Voice of a Woman_
Yea, what of it?...’
_Madison J. Cawein._
A list which bands together as (even occasional) mystics such writers
as Clifford Bax, Robert Buchanan, G. K. Chesterton, Aubrey de Vere,
Eva Gore-Booth, Sir Edmund Gosse, W. E. Henley, Jean Ingelow, Laurence
Housman, George Macdonald, John Masefield, Sir Henry Newbolt, Alfred
Noyes, John Oxenham, Alexander Pope, Sir James Rennell Rodd, Arthur
Symons, Evelyn Underhill and Oscar Wilde, can only move us to wonder
why anybody has been left out at all by the ambitious anthologist.
‘Mystical,’ then, as stock-label, besides putting the critic who uses
it under suspicion, may merely indicate a mental muddiness in the poet,
the celebration of vagueness by minds incapable of clarity. However,
though there are inferior mystics posing as poets and inferior poets
posing as mystics, the mystic function need not be called in question.
Mystical experience is an arrival at a proved state of sublimity; and
men have been sublime. There is a close resemblance, moreover, between
mystical contemplation and poetic concentration: the difference is
principally in the object, which in the first is predictable, in the
second unpredictable. A critic might profitably occupy himself in
showing where these experiences coincided and where they diverged and
thus give himself a critical excuse for anthologizing. But he would
hesitate to admit the need for an excuse; believing it safer for his
prestige to go on occupying himself unprofitably--and so it is.
All poetical categories reduce to the subject category. For poetry is
most easily digested as a parallelism in Song of all the headings of
the encyclopædia of rational prose life--a compressed pocket-universe.
A poem is something quite new. The critic, a self-appointed busy-body
and guardian of ancient peace, suppresses the heresy by showing it
to be something quite old; the anthology makes poetry conform as far
as possible to the conventions of stereotyped appearance. Hence the
anthology-label, under whose reassuring stamp poetry reads like a
twice-told tale.
Chapter VIII
ANTHOLOGIES AND THE LIVING POET
The anthology meets with two different kinds of reactions in living
poets. They will write either toward the anthology or away from
it. Anti-anthology poets often overreach themselves, inflicting
self-protective distortions on their work--as parents in old Central
Europe often deliberately maimed their sons to save them from
compulsory military service. But the problem of remaining outside the
anthology system should be to the poet no other than the problem of
writing as it is best for him to write. Once it becomes a separate
problem, his work is distracted with snobbish considerations. The
charmlessness of some of the best poetry of our time is in part due to
a militant disdain of anthology standards and criticism.
But in the long run it is almost impossible to hold out against
the anthology. One of the ‘romances of modern publishing’ is the
success of Messrs. Benn’s set of sixpenny modern English poets, _The
Augustan Books of Modern Poetry_, also published in America by Messrs.
Stokes--with a corresponding set of American poets by Messrs. Simon
& Schuster. The less popular poets of these series are naturally glad
of a chance of freeing themselves from the anthology and of finding
a few new intelligent readers among the greater public which they
could otherwise never reach. A number of these small volumes, which
average two thousand lines apiece, can be bound together to make a
very good _introductory_ anthology to the works of the various poets
concerned; for in each case the poet has approved of the selection and
arrangement. But only introductory; seldom representative of the whole
body of a poet’s work. The general editors have a very clear idea of
what the sixpence-in-purse public will stand, and are particularly
bound to respect the limitations of the school-teacher. Hence the
poet is only permitted to include his ‘sweetest’ and, because of the
word-limit, his shortest poems, so as to give an appearance of variety.
In fact, the majority of these poems approximate closely to the demands
of the anthology reader, though they were not originally written toward
the anthology.
A poet like Edith Sitwell, however, should come off better than most
in this series because she has written very few anthology pieces.
Also, because she is included in the series as a notoriously modernist
poet (about whom the public, which pretends to but does not buy her
individual volumes, is glad, for six-pence, to satisfy its curiosity),
she can put in more or less what she likes, except naughty poems in
which Bishops, Beelzebub and Queen Victoria occur. She is even at
liberty to omit the only poem, an uncharacteristic one, by which she
is known in the anthologies, _The King of China’s Daughter_, a fancy
restatement of a simple nursery rhyme, done in the days before she
had found herself as a poet. Yet from polite condescension she feels
constrained to print _Colonel Fantock_ and _The little Ghost who died
for Love_, instances of charming and completely traditional writing.
And now the pleasure of being popularly received in spite of herself
has led her, in _Rustic Elegies_, to write, one would say, definitely
toward the anthology.
Similarly James Joyce, in _Pomes Penyeach_, published after _Ulysses_,
capitulates to the success of the early _Chamber Music_, which was
represented in Mr. Colum’s _Anthology of Irish Verse_ by stanzas like
the following:
‘This heart that flutters near my heart
My hope and all my riches is,
Unhappy when we draw apart
And happy between kiss and kiss;
My hope and all my riches--yes!--
And all my happiness.’
The unanthological Joyce is to be found hidden away in his
unanthological prose work. The _Ballad of Joking Jesus_, for example,
in _Ulysses_:
‘I’m the queerest young fellow
That ever you heard,
My mother’s a jew,
My father’s a bird....’
One of the most recently dated of the ‘pomes’ is:
_Bahnhofstrasse._
‘The eyes that mock me sign the way
Whereto I pass at eve of day,
Grey way whose violet signals are
The trysting and the twining star.
Ah star of evil! star of pain!
High-hearted youth comes not again
Nor old heart’s wisdom yet to know
The signs that mock me as I go.’
The high-brow success of the _Waste Land_ brought T. S. Eliot into the
anthologies with the _Conversation Galante_ and other ingratiating
early pieces:
‘I observe: “Our sentimental friend, the moon!
Or possibly (fantastic, I confess)
It may be Prester John’s balloon
Or an old battered lantern hung aloft
To light poor travellers in their distress.”
She then: “How you digress!”’
And now, captured by general fame, he is busy wiping out his waste
years with poems like the _Journey of the Magi_, pursuing his anthology
career in earnest.
Anthology pressure is indeed difficult to resist. Poets who have
happened to have a popular success with a poem are tempted to repeat
themselves with another on the same model; and the second is often
equally popular in anthologies. So Burns’ _Wee modest crimson-tippèd
flower_ and his _Wee sleekit cow’ring tim’rous beastie_, candidates
for the contemporary _Beauties of the Poets_; and so De la Mare’s _Far
are those tranquil hills_ and his _Far are the shades of Arabia_.
So at first sight Shakespeare’s early song, _When daisies pied and
violets blue_ and his later _When daffodils begin to peer_. Shakespeare
not only repeated a popular success of his own, but he was not above
repeating a popular success of someone else’s. He did it, for example,
with Lyly’s poem _What bird so sings yet so does wail?_ popularized by
the play _Alexander and Campaspe_, which is full of ‘reminiscences’ of
Shakespeare’s later borrowings from it. But Shakespeare’s songs were
intended for his not very serious comedies. Furthermore, they were
never offered by him as anthological poems. _When daisies pied_ and the
other ‘when’ poems are definitely satiric of the properly anthological
poems of Breton, Barnfield and others. No such excuse can be found for
Tennyson’s _When cats run home and light is come_, a plagiarization
of Shakespeare’s _When icicles hang by the wall_ with an ambitious
anthological cast.
So John Clare, when taken up by literary London and put into the
peasant-poet category of which Burns was then the leading example, was
cajoled into writing:
‘The bloom’s on the brere, bonny lassie oh!
Oak apple’s on the tree, and wilt thou gang to see
The shed I’ve made for thee,
Bonnie lassie oh?’
‘... with the woodbine peeping in ...’
and even into trying his hand at drawing-room stuff in the manner of
Moore and Byron:
‘Maid of Jerusalem, by the Dead Sea,
I wandered all sorrowing, thinking of thee:
Thy city in ruins, thy kindred deplored,
All fallen and lost by the Ottoman sword’--
when he could write and had already written better poetry than Burns,
Byron and Moore at their best. But poor Clare, in financial straits,
had his eye on the heavy fees then paid by the yearly Keep-Sake
anthology.
The present-day Living-Poet anthology sorts itself into four general
types. The first is the schoolroom anthology supplementing the usual
Dead-Poet anthology, including only the works of poets who write
best poems in the tradition of thirty years ago. This entombment of
the Living-Dead has its merits: these poets, jealous of each other
with a rancour not to be found among their juniors, are glad to
be safely in port ‘among the _English Poets_’--as poor Keats hoped
some day to be. And their removal from life to literature clears the
decks somewhat for a new generation which may do no better, but could
hardly do much worse. _Poetry of To-day_, published in England by the
English Association principally for use in English Schools, is more
up to date than the usual anthology of this sort. Its object is to
brighten the Poetry Lesson in the Freubelized school where they hang
up orange curtains in every room and do Eurhythmics at the proper
interval after a carefully caloried breakfast. This sort of anthology
exhibits all the worst traits of the ordinary popular anthology. It
does not present the poetry of a real ‘to-day’ but of a rejuvenated
yesterday. Its message is: ‘Now this morning, dear children (and any
of you older people who like to listen to my little chat), I have a
wonderful secret for you. _The poets are not all dead_ as you have
been accustomed to think. Shakespeare is dead, alas, and so are Byron,
Tennyson and the heroic Robert Brooke of whom I spoke yesterday in
my talk about the Meaning of Patriotism. But great poets are still
alive to-day, walking among us with their marvellous heads full of
the same marvellous magic for us. There’s a hill near Oxford where no
fewer than three of them live quite close to each other: Dr. Bridges,
the Poet Laureate (like Tennyson was); and Mr. Gilbert Murray, whose
wonderful translation of _Alcestis_ we are going to act as a play
next term; and Mr. John Masefield, perhaps the greatest poet of our
day, who writes so beautifully of the Sea and Hunting and Racing and
other exciting subjects--sometimes so sadly, but always so beautifully.
And then there is Mr. Laurence Binyon, the great master of the modern
Ode, and the musical Mr. De la Mare, and Mr. W. H. Davies who was once
a tramp--which shows that the Spirit of Poetry blows unaccountably
about like the wind and may light on any man: who knows, it may one
day, please God, fall on one of you here ...’ etc. The corresponding
American poetry lesson exists, with post-Stedman American Anthologies
and Poetic Worlds ranging in gentle gradation from Edwin Markham’s _Man
with the Hoe_ to Vachel Lindsay’s _Chinese Nightingale_--modern, in the
American secondary-school sense, means nearly dead American. There was
this to be said for the old-fashioned straight-classical education,
that what corresponded in the curriculum to the modern Poetry Lesson,
the making of Latin Verses on the model of Ovid and Virgil, was never
felt by the child to have any connection with poetry and was rather an
amusing game, like the cross-word puzzle. Lucretius was too early to
be a model and Catullus too un-Latin (having broken many of Virgil’s
and Ovid’s rules): so poetry was spared from the school-boy as he from
it; and if in the play-hour he read or even wrote English poetry, the
shadow of the blackboard did not darken the page.
A second type of the Living-Poet anthology is the subscription
anthology and is closely connected with the Poetry-Magazine movement.
It is a simple money-making matter, cleverly exploiting the
inexperience and ambition of young and old fools of both sexes who have
read too many anthologies and are thrilled at any prospect of seeing
their own work in print. The usual method is to collect a clientèle
through a poetry magazine with a publishing house attached; to solicit
manuscripts, which is always encouraging; to propose the publication of
a slim single-man booklet for which must be guaranteed a sum equivalent
to five times the actual cost of printing the book--the publisher,
from his high opinion of the work, promising to take half the risk in
an edition of five hundred copies. The little poet is delighted at the
idea and raises the money. After a long delay about a hundred copies
are really printed, at trifling cost; they are not advertised. The
author’s friends buy up about fifty or sixty, but no others are sold.
The publisher shakes his head in pretended disappointment at the sales,
the author feels sorry to have cheated him out of his half-share in the
risk, admires his unselfish declaration: ‘But it was an honour to have
published the book!’ and is then ready to ‘advertise’ the book in the
subscription-anthology in which, with his hundred fellow-gulls, he is
enrolled at the cost, say, of two guineas or ten dollars a poem. Here
the expense of publishing is somewhat greater, but the gulls and their
friends buy up enough copies to make the venture a very profitable one
to the publisher, who uses the anthology as a net for further fish.
Sometimes the subscription-anthology is published by the committee of a
literary society on behalf of its members. _The Bookfellow Anthology_,
Chicago, 1926, may be an example of this, though it is not clear
whether the not-inconsiderable profits of the previous issue went
to the copyright holder, Flora Warren Seymour, or to George Steele
Seymour who wrote the introduction, or to the general funds of the
Bookfellow Association, of which the Seymours are officials, possibly
paid officials, or to the funds of the Bookfellow poetry-magazine, _The
Step-Ladder_, of the editorial staff of which (it is possible to deduce
from the anthology) they are members. At all events:
‘The terms for entry into this volume were the same as for the
1925 Anthology. Contributors were required to be Bookfellows [that
is, to pay a membership fee, which included a subscription to the
_Step-Ladder_] and to purchase three copies of the book for each
page contributed, the price of the book being fixed at two dollars
per copy. Not more than ten pages might be contributed by any one
person.’
It appears that the ‘co-operating publishers’ of 1925 sent their
spare-copies free to the libraries and newspaper offices. ‘As our plan
had not contemplated the giving away of free copies at the expense of
increased cost of production, this generous act of our associates at
once surprised and pleased us.’ And this edition, and another too, was
sold out.
‘A few of the contributing authors were themselves
newspaper-writers, and they lent their efforts with a will to the
task of putting it over.... We shall say little of the imitations
that at once sprang up, for they were palpably imitations in every
respect save one--that the power of co-operative publishing which
we Bookfellows command was not behind them. And as they languish
unsold and uncirculated--the inevitable fate of the book that is
not wanted--we come forward again with our 1926 Anthology’--
whose pages of verse number 235. Multiply that by six and the answer
in dollars is the _certain_ takings of the volume, that is, 1,410
dollars. Further takings from actual sales should bring in at least
another two or three hundred dollars. As the cost of producing the
book itself (it was printed at a private press), with no distribution
expenses beyond the postage of the copies to the authors (perhaps even
these were carriage forward), could not have exceeded, at the most,
five hundred dollars for the edition of eight hundred copies, someone
seems to have made a nice little sum out of the ‘co-operative venture.’
As it is not so recorded, we may not take it for granted that the
contributors or ‘associated publishers’ were each sent back two-thirds
of their subscription. But such contributors are not captious about
returns: this is a consolation-anthology. They believe that a printed
book has more lastingness than the files of a poetry-magazine and
that when the printed book gets round to newspaper-critics this may
be the beginning of a poetic career for each of them--a still higher
rung of the step-ladder. Such a dream may be worth while even at six
dollars a page, and even if, as in the case of Jessie E. Williams, who
contributed six pages, the average printed on each page is only ten
lines. But it should be commercially possible to dream it more cheaply.
A third type of Living-Poet anthology deals in the marketable sentiment
aroused by some event of public importance--the murder of President
McKinley, the death of Edward the Peace-Maker, the Sinking of the
_Titanic_, the Outbreak of War, the Victory. That President McKinley,
the puppet-nominee of the Trusts at their most cynically corrupt stage,
was murdered by a maniac; that Edward the Peace-Maker, personally
responsible for the English Entente with France and therefore for the
destruction of the Anglo-German alliance which was keeping the peace
of Europe, died after a life not particularly distinguished for the
qualities which his idealistic German mother and father had tried to
inculcate in him; that the _Titanic_ was sunk as a result of culpable
negligence on the part of the staff and that its sinking was attended
by scenes that, to say the least of it, compared unfavourably with
those at the sinking of the _Birkenhead_; that the English Liberal
Government was able to justify by the German invasion of Belgium its
own secret commitments to and preparations for a war that had as its
object the crippling of a commercial rival; and finally that this War
was technically won by weight of numbers and munitions after a gross
display of atrocities on both sides--all this is history. But the
anthologist and his poet have no more respect for history than for
poetry, for public than for personal truth.
Mr. Braithwaite’s _Victory! Celebrated by Thirty-eight American Poets_
begins with a series of panegyrics on the heroes of the time, of the
quality of which this sestet of a sonnet to Marshal Foch is a fair
example:
‘Focus of freedom--Foch! Your mind has made
Reason--religion’s theme, intelligence--
An anthem rising from the blood-dark sod.
Your brow--a temple where the world has prayed,
Your brain--of myriad souls the single lens:
A burning glass, held in the hand of God.’
Since King Albert, Sir Douglas Haig, General Diaz, General Pershing
and Cardinal Mercier have each to be celebrated as the unique heroes of
Victory there is some discrepancy--but never mind, they were all jolly
good fellows, even--guess whom!--General Leonard Wood!
‘Had not your spirit led, our ardent youth
Had faltered leaderless, their eager feet
Attuned to effort for the valiant truth,
Through your command alone, rushed to complete
To hold on high the torch of Liberty
Great visioned soul, yours is the victory.’
This marketable sentiment is chiefly Franco-American (the literary
references to Lafayette and Joan of Arc are not tactful, but may be set
off against the English victory hymns recollecting Waterloo and the
Flanders campaigns of Marlborough). The victory mood in America yielded
precedence in valour and sacrifice only to the French, exalted Château
Thierry into a major military operation and concealed the fact that the
total casualties of the British Forces were between eighty and ninety
times greater than the American. Sometimes not even to France, as when
Edgar Lee Masters writes of
‘the glory of England, glory of Italy, glory of France
And the imperishable glory of America.’
The introduction, again, begins tactlessly:
‘Lowell’s great lines ring as true to-day as at the close of the
Civil War:
“Come, Peace! not like a mourner bowed,
For honour lost and dear ones wasted,
But proud, to meet a people proud
With eyes that tell of triumph tasted.”’
This is rather hard on the Southern regiments who also marched to glory
at Château Thierry.
The moral of the collection is also confused: undying hate against
Germany on the one hand, eternal peace on the other; ‘Sew the flags
together’ (Vachel Lindsay) and American nationalism triumphant; and
liberal rhetoric like Mr. Untermeyer’s
‘Soon these battered heroes will come back
The same, yet not the same.
‘They who have bandied words in No Man’s Land
Will never be the old and abject crowd.
They will not grovel and they will not stand
What used to keep them cowed.’
Mr. Untermeyer’s battered heroes unfortunately fulfilled his promise
only too literally: E. E. Cummings, for instance, in his charming
portrait (not included in _Victory_):
‘A tear within his stern blue eye
upon his firm white lips a smile,
one thought alone: to do and die
for God for country and for Yale
‘above his blond determined head
the sacred flag of truth unfurled,
in the bright heyday of his youth
the upper class American
‘unsullied stands, before the world:
with manly heart and conscience free,
upon the front steps of her home
by the high minded pure young girl
‘much kissed, by loving relatives
well fed, and fully photographed
the son of man goes forth to war
with trumpets clap and syphilis.’
A fourth type is the yearly Best Poem anthology which is generally
conducted for the publisher by a minor anthology poet, such as L. A. G.
Strong, author of _Dublin Days_, _The Lowery Road_, _Difficult Love_,
and Thomas Moult, author of _Down Here the Hawthorn_. It purports to
give an annual summary of the ‘best’ poetry that can be winnowed from
magazine verse. It never assigns more than two poems to any individual
author, and by giving the public which ‘wishes to be informed of
contemporary verse-tendencies’ ready-made taste in names kills any
critical interest in poetry itself. All these volumes are of a uniform
size: which gives away the game at once. If there was any real critical
interest in their compilation the 1925 volume would have been perhaps a
thin pamphlet, the 1926 volume a still thinner one, while in 1927 an
official announcement might have been issued to subscribers: ‘We regret
that this year the vintage has failed and no anthology will be printed.’
The financial history of these ‘Best Poems of ...’ anthologies--which
as a matter of fact are only commercially successful in the sense that
they pay the publisher better than volumes by individual authors--is
interesting: though no contributors are invited to pay their fee for
inclusion, to become ‘co-publishers’ at six dollars a page, not many
are given any fee other than their presentation-copy. There are,
however, a few ‘names’ which must be secured in order to give the
collection an air of respectability. Each ‘name’ is paid for according
to the owner’s awareness of its exact market-value. An unwholesome
situation is thus at once created: the anthologist, on behalf of his
publishers, either offers to print a poem free as a favour, or, as a
greater favour still, offers a small fee for it. In cases where a fee
is demanded and the name is uncertain, the anthologist punishes the
shylock by omitting him. For the most part he takes advantage of the
‘uncommercial spirit’ of grateful verse-writers.
Many of the features of the more general popular anthology are to be
found in this type. The same salad-mixing of subject, for example, the
same Composite Picture of the (Modern) Poetic World. Indeed, if we are
to have more of these anthologies of _Living and Willing Poets_, and
if the reading public continues to support them, we may as well have
‘Bespoke Yearlies,’ in which the poems are written (by poets who have
‘made good’) to the order of the anthologist.
Once this system was inaugurated an English committee might get in
touch with an American committee, and a combined Poetical Budget might
be made out on the first of April every year. To Mr. Conrad Aiken would
be allotted the Garden poem; to Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay, the Old
Woman poem; to Mr. T. S. Eliot, the Old Man Poem; to Mr. Wolfe, the
Lamb poem; to Mr. Chesterton, the Love Song; and so on, each with
one or if necessary two competent under-studies. This would mean a
high standard of writing and no overlapping or jealousy. The Official
Anthology would appear punctually on November 5th each year and
would be on sale at all railway bookstalls, leading stationers, Army
canteens, Woolworth Stores, etc.; and it would be possible to pay each
poet as much for his quota as he makes in a year from private volumes
and from book-reviews. It would be pointed out in the first issue that
poetry is now an important public service and that private enterprise
is to be considered anti-social and uneconomic; and that the aim of
this Official Anthology is to protect the public from freebooting poets
and freebooting poets from themselves.
Chapter IX
CONCLUSION
The growth of the modern popular anthology in England can be traced
through the stage of medium-sized ‘Beauties of the Poets,’ which were
guides to Chalmers’ twenty-one volume _English Poets_ published in 1810
(or to the less complete Libraries of Poets that went before), to a
final condensation in the miniature _Golden Treasury_, 1861, which also
contained the cream of the poetry of the new century. This abridgment
of the _English Poets_ was so well received that Chalmers went out of
print and has had no successor: the publishing unit for poetry in the
bulk is now the abridgment itself.
America, which never had a Chalmers, was content throughout the
nineteenth century with a series of compendiums of mixed verse,
very much larger in size than the English anthologies. These were
really popular in feeling; they were compiled for the American
average reader at a time when the gap between his taste and that
of the advanced reader was not great, when it was therefore not
necessary to anthologize either up or down to suit a particular
public. One of the earliest of these volumes, first published in
1842 at Philadelphia, consists entirely of American writers--_The
Poets and Poetry of America_, edited by Rufus Wilmot Griswold. It
was described as a survey of the beginnings of a true American
literature in the first half-century of freedom: ‘until the spirit of
freedom began to influence the national character very little verse
worthy of preservation was produced in America. The poetry of the
Colonies was without originality, energy, feeling or correctness of
diction.’ Griswold’s method is to give the work of over a hundred
poets--practically all there were--allotting generous page-space
and a biographical note to each; and since the contributors are not
strongly differentiated in style and subject he covers the field well
enough. Griswold in 1849 later divided up the book into two parts,
separately published, _the Poets_ and _the Female Poets_ of America.
The male poets given most space were Charles Hoffman, Bryant, Percival,
Whittier, Holmes, Brainard, Pierpont, Pinkney, Emerson, Longfellow,
Sprague, Poe; in that order. Hoffman has thirty-six poems, Poe
fourteen: which is very fair when you read them both without prejudice.
The female poets of this half-century are forgotten names: Sarah
Josepha Hale, Emma Willard, Lavinia Stoddard, Lydia Sigourney, Maria
Brooks, Sarah Helen Whitman and Frances Osgood (the two last-named of
Poe-ish fame), Elizabeth Kinney, Mary Stebbins, etc.
Griswold’s collection unfortunately prepared the way for others less
harmless: trying to cover too much ground, they had to arrange their
material according to subject-categories in order to handle it, and
to mutilate poems to save space. Charles Dana’s _Household Book of
Poetry_, first published in 1856, was a quarto of over eight hundred
double-columned pages of the combined gems of American and English
verse. Dana arranged the poems for household uses, like kitchen stores:
Poems of Nature, Poems of Childhood, Poems of Friendship, Poems of
Love, Poems of Ambition, Poems of Comedy, Poems of Tragedy and Sorrow,
Poems of the Imagination, Poems of Sentiment and Reflection. A solid
book, successful enough to produce many solid imitations, including
Whittier’s _Songs of Three Centuries_, Emerson’s _Parnassus_, and
Fields’ and Whipple’s _Family Library of British Poets_. The household
as a reading-unit was a discovery of American Victorianism and did not
survive it (it was also discovered in Victorian England, but Archbishop
Trench’s _Household Book of Poetry_, published in the ’fifties, had
few, if any, English imitators). The biggest and most ambitious of all
these family compendiums was Bryant’s _Family Library of Poetry and
Song, Being Choice Selections from the Best Poets, English, Irish,
Scottish and American, including Translations from the German, Spanish,
French, Portuguese, Persian, Latin, Greek, etc._, a quarto of over a
thousand pages. He keeps Dana’s arrangement but adds new categories:
Poems of Temperance and Labour, Poems of Patriotism and Freedom, Poems
of the Sea, and so on. Nearly all these compendiums are grangerized
with poetical engravings, depicting Scottish Maidens, Drowned Maidens,
Storms, Bouquets, the Stricken Stag, the Convent Cloister and the
birthplaces and libraries of well-known American poets. But it is
difficult to feel severe about these books: though they show not the
slightest suspicion of what poetry is all about, they have other simple
virtues of which honesty and undifferentiating kindliness are the
chief; and they were genuinely read and enjoyed; and they are no longer
published; and, if they survive at all in remote parlours, give comfort
where comfort is needed.
Griswold’s _Poets and Poetry of America_ was superseded by Edmund
Clarence Stedman’s _An American Anthology, 1787–1900_, a more ambitious
version of his earlier _Poets of America_, as his _Victorian Anthology_
was of his _Victorian Poets_. But as Stedman’s page-length was less
than Griswold’s in spite of the addition of sixty years of poetry
the result is unsatisfactory. Griswold printed just as much as was
historically pertinent; his was, in fact, a true period-anthology.
Stedman fell into the anthology trap because he wanted to be critical,
as he rightly believed Griswold had not been. ‘But if this anthology
were modelled upon his “Poets and Poetry of America” it would occupy a
shelf of volumes’; which it should have done.
In the new century, in place of the large family compendium, America
adopted the shorter sample-anthology of the English variety, which
professes to be merely a guide to, not a substitute for, the works of
the poets represented. But the difficulty in both countries is that
of ready access to the poets, the absence, in fact, of an up-to-date
Chalmers. There have been several partial Libraries of the Poets
published, with a single volume for each poet: the _Globe_ series, the
_Muses’ Library_, the _Everyman_ series and the _Mermaid_ series. But
no publishing house has undertaken to print a definite corpus on the
Chalmers’ model. Yet copyright troubles are not so serious as they
were a hundred years ago because, except for a few odd pieces lately
discovered or texts ‘established’ of ancient poets, one may reprint
almost anything. And much more compendious works have been frequently
attempted, brought to conclusion and kept up to date. _The Encyclopædia
Britannica_ and _New English Dictionary_ are immediate instances--not
to mention the many historical and scientific encyclopædias or series;
and the _Loeb Classical Library_, a collection which in spite of its
great value is of far less importance to the English-speaking world
than a library of English Poetry, makes steady progress.
Our first suggestion for the defeat of the popular anthology is that
the publishers should meet in the friendly way that their predecessors
the booksellers met in Dr. Johnson’s day, sinking their separate
financial interests for the occasion, and agree to share the labour,
expense and profits of a new standard _English Poets_ to be published
co-ordinately in England and America. Any publisher who has commercial
interests in any particular poet should, of course, have these assessed
by an impartial committee. Since the collection when complete would
consist of perhaps thirty large quartos, each containing a number
of poets, the harm done to handy individual volumes in series like
the _Globe_ and _Everyman_ would be inconsiderable. The poets chosen
would be mostly out-of-copyright poets; the latest at any rate need
be no later than the day before yesterday. There would, we believe,
be an immediate and satisfactory demand from all libraries, colleges,
clubs of any size and from a number of private persons. Given this
representative Corpus of dead poets, including those omitted by
Chalmers, the whole situation begins to clear. We become independent of
the tyranny of anthologies; if we want to read and judge how much of a
poet Mathew Green or Thomas Flatman or Robert Henrysoun was, we are no
longer forced into probably fruitless search in the Municipal Library,
or into eating the few dry crumbs that we find or do not find in the
_Golden Treasury_ or the _Oxford Book of English Verse_. As things
are, if we wish to buy the volume there is no means of finding the
publishers of the most authoritative edition; if we apply to a large
bookshop we cannot be certain whether its critical judgment is to be
trusted. If we write to the _Reader’s Guide_ of a literary review we
shall, after about six months, get an evasive answer. Or even if in
some cases such editions not only exist but are easily obtainable, the
expense will be great--very great if our interest in the lesser known
poets is broad. Suppose Skelton is wanted, Dyce’s edition, a very good
one indeed published in 1843, may cost as much as five pounds; Richard
Hughes’ edition of 1924, though it contains a poem not known to Dyce,
is only a selection. Other poets are also published at prices which
mount up prohibitively--Hopkins, Blake, Traherne, Smart, the Scottish
Chaucerians. In the Corpus we would have each poet, complete and in his
place, from Cynewulf onward: and for people with small libraries this
would be a great economy in money, time and shelf-space.
One of the greatest benefits of the Corpus would be the disappearance
of the ‘corners’ of knowledge by which the critic contrives to dupe and
impress the general reader. An obscure and almost worthless poet is
cried up as a neglected genius on the strength of a few better lines:
the reader cannot check the judgment, and perhaps allows himself to
be convinced, adding another name to his list of snobbish literary
mentions. Not only these, but better-known poets, such as Dryden or
Ben Jonson, never read but taken for granted on the critic’s word,
would have to be at least looked at because they were there. The usual
anthology blur would be avoided, because all the work of each poet
would appear. The oppressiveness of the great names, moreover, which
generally upsets the balance of the anthology, would be counteracted by
the size of the Corpus itself.
Educationalists should encourage such a collection. Much of the
artificiality of English literature courses at the Universities is due
to the inadequacy of the local library, in which the English poetry
representation consists of random and non-uniform volumes, with many
gaps. Students are thus obliged to get their critical views from
second-hand sources like W. J. Courthope’s _History of English Poetry_
and _The Cambridge History of English Literature_. And frequently the
professors themselves have had no other sources but these. With the
Corpus, students would be able to discard such text-book lies as ‘The
Age of Shakespeare,’ ‘The Age of Dryden,’ ‘The Age of Wordsworth.’
Poetry would show itself to be not a sequence of fashions, but of
individual poets who are poets only to the extent to which they are
outside the sequence of fashions.
This full Corpus would include all poets who had a certain recognizable
minimum of credibility: there is poetry which is not even historically
significant and about which every one, whatever his literary politics,
agrees. Thus Spratt, Lyttelton, Cawthorn, John Cunningham, Boyse and
a dozen more eighteenth-century writers included by Chalmers would
be probably unanimously omitted from the Corpus by a representative
committee, as others omitted by Chalmers would be included. If there
were any disagreement at all as to whether or not a poet should be
included, he would naturally be included. Where it was agreed to
include a poet, disagreement as to his relative merit would not matter,
as each poet would be printed entire and in a uniform manner. If a poet
in his old age has, like Wordsworth, rewritten the poems of his youth,
both versions should be given. The texts should be correlated with
great accuracy and the Universities called upon to help in this matter.
Candidates for a degree in English Literature, who are always at a loss
for a suitable thesis-task, might well be set to work on this.
Given such a collection, with its particular volumes devoted to the
anonymous waifs and strays of a given period (the true anthologies),
the popular anthology loses much of its power to vulgarize poetry.
Even Palgrave and his rivals could be restrained from doing serious
damage if the Corpus included a skeleton appendix of these anthologies,
reducing them to mere Recommendations for Reading in the Corpus: a
list of page and volume references with such notes as ‘stanzas 4 and 5
omitted’ and ‘text reformed as follows for use in schools.’ If private
manuscript-anthologies were kept again they would remain private; at
the most, they might be condensed into page-references and included
at the end of the Corpus as ‘Miss So-and-so’s’ or ‘Mr. So-and-so’s’
Reading Recommendation.
Every ten years it would be found necessary to print a supplement
bringing the Corpus up to date, as with the _Encyclopædia Britannica_,
and at longer intervals complete new printings. This would mean not
only the improvement of texts--the Corpus could provide a much-needed
international clearinghouse for variorum readings, newly discovered
poems, re-attributions of poems, re-datings and so forth--but the
inclusion of further poets, both older ones revived and more recent
ones who had just passed through the thirty years’ purgatory qualifying
them for admission. University bodies might further be employed in
providing a grand Poetical Concordance, on the lines of the Biblical
Concordance. All the _Larks_ and _Solitudes_ and _Kisses_ and so on
could be thus assembled far more effectively than by a single editor
at present. Even with a poetical concordance there would be plenty of
minor tricks left for the amusement of private scholars. But besides
a concordance, there is the enormous task of making a cross-reference
index of unconscious or deliberate plagiarisms and adaptations. Let
the editors print Lady John Scott’s version of _Annie Laurie_, but
refer back to Douglas of Fingland’s original; let them print Chaucer
in the original, and then show by Dryden’s adaptations what the late
seventeenth-century preferred. Let them print Shirley’s ‘Glories of our
Blood and State,’ and refer back to Shakespeare’s ‘Fidele’s Dirge.’
Let them mark Herrick with the back-references to Skelton’s _Philip
Sparrow_; mark Burns with back-references to the popular ballads; mark
Clare with back-references to Burns and Moore, and refer his _Skylark_
back to Shelley’s. Let them print Shakespeare’s songs in the dramas
as they occur, and then refer to the borrowings. Let them, in a full
bibliographical index, show in the case of poets whose works were not
collected in volume-form in their own day at what point they became
part of literary history; or, in the case of poets like Donne and
Campion, at what point they were restored to literary history after a
lapse of popularity.
The collection need not be as trying as Chalmers, although printed
at four times his length: Chalmers did not have India paper at his
disposal and so was obliged to use very small print. Nor would it be
beyond the interest of the general reader. For the general reader of
poetry is a _general_ reader. The skimmer in poetry is not a reader,
as with the popular novel: the reader either reads poetry and reads it
generally, or he is no reader at all. The popular anthology, indeed,
is composed not for readers, but, like the popular novel, for skimmers:
the purchaser’s interest is not in _reading_, merely in _seeing_ who
is in it, what the titles are like, what look the poems have. Yet the
general reader need not be an expert reader. For the inexpert reader
the skeleton anthologies printed in the appendix at the end of the
Corpus could act as guides. And when he turned, say, to _Woak Hill_ by
Barnes or _I am but what I am who cares or knows_ by Clare, he would
find these usual anthology poems in their right setting, in their right
version, in their right spelling, and entire.
The new Corpus, then, would present past poetry in the bulk, poetry,
that is, removed by at least a generation from the politics of
contemporary literature; it would introduce order into quantity by
giving the quantity complete. But it is a question whether it could
be profitably extended to contemporary poetry: it might introduce
into it an order which was qualitative rather than quantitative, a
liberal order of taste. If not, how might contemporary authors come
up for eventual election to the Corpus? Rather by waiting two hundred
years in manuscript like Traherne than registering themselves in
popular anthologies of the present Living-Poet variety; anthologies
which are mostly compiled from magazine-material, so that the work
included is the least characteristic work of the better poets and the
most characteristic of the worse--the most anthologizable of both.
The anthologist has used the magazines merely as the cheapest and
laziest means of getting his material together; he rarely consults
the individual volumes of the poets themselves--if he does, he still
keeps magazine standards. Moreover, because of these standards, it
is very difficult indeed for an uncommercializable poet to get his
work published in any form. Undistinguished but old-fashioned and
undistinguished but new-fashioned poetry can get printed easily enough
as dressing to a publisher’s list. There are publishers who specialize
in new-fashioned poetry as there are others who specialize in old. But
poetry of an unorthodox and yet not aggressively sensational type often
remains unpublished for years, because it is without obvious commercial
value.
Suppose, for the moment, that poetry of even an unpopular character
were freely printed: why could not the Corpus do for contemporary
poetry what it could do for past poetry: print every so many years a
supplement of contemporary poetry? Such a supplement might contain,
with the authors’ permission, all the poetry printed in volume-form
in the period covered, omitting work in each case which the author
wished to discredit. If obviously inconsequential volumes were excluded
according to the same principle that was suggested for the Corpus
itself (but none because they seemed difficult to label or otherwise
difficult, the object of such a supplement being not critical but
to include as much as could be decently included), the size and
expense would not be prohibitive. Especially when one considers the
expenditure made on various bulky directories published yearly and
even twice yearly--telephone directories, street directories, Who’s
Who’s, Peerages, Landed Gentries, Fraternity Year Books, College Year
Books, Blue Books, Business Directories, Garden, Clothing and Furniture
Catalogues, Literary Year Books, Publishers’ Catalogues, Guidebooks
to Hotels and Pensions of France, Patent Medicine Almanacs, etc. The
expense of such a supplement could be considerably reduced, moreover,
by making it a subscription edition. Incidental financial problems
would remain--the value of contemporary poems varies with critical
wire-pulling and first-edition speculation and unaccountable fashion
and would be difficult to assess. But even if the financial question
could be adjusted, a committee would not be likely to agree as to
what contemporary poetry was inconsequential as a similar one could
about past poetry. Indeed, it would be impossible at the start to form
a committee representative of all legitimate tastes in contemporary
poetry: the same economic forces that govern the publishing of poetry
at the present time would also govern the definition of legitimacy.
Why could not poets themselves combine to form libraries? Principally
because most poets belong to cliques and would be prevented by
personal feeling or critical bias from combining in a large way.
And the few independents would be indifferent. Small co-operative
anthologies are usually just advertising organs for a new brand
of poetry, like the _Imagist_ series; or tea-parties of co-opted
popular-anthology successes raised above clique-jealousy, like the
_American Miscellany_. The recent _Fugitive_ anthology is perhaps as
inoffensive as a small co-operative anthology may be; it is in the
nature of a memorial volume to the friendliness of a few poets once
temporarily associated--by geography rather than by programme. It
is difficult to decide whether the co-operative clique-anthology is
better or worse than the publicity anthology conducted on behalf of
poets by the poetry enthusiast or the professional anthologist, who
create cliques. It is exceptional to find an editor of the integrity
of E.M., the founder of _Georgian Poetry_, which began as an attempt
to call attention to certain poets who had not come so far under
public notice and continued biennially for ten years. E.M. kept in the
background with a most unusual restraint, wrote no purple prefaces,
paid his contributors generously, exercised no patronage and, when he
found that the task that he had set himself in the 1911–1912 volume
had been accomplished and that the newer generation of writers had
aims unintelligible or unacceptable to him, decided to discontinue the
series though it was still in popular demand. He never associated
himself with any poetry-magazines or societies and published no verse
of his own until the series was over. However, even _Georgian Poetry_,
like the _Imagist Anthology_ did little in the long run but institute a
fashion in verse-writing and make it difficult for the poets included
to shake off the fashion or the label.
The rejection of a supplement to a Corpus of poetry, the rejection in
fact of the Living-Poet anthology in any disguise, seems to bring the
fate of contemporary poetry with contemporaries to a dead halt. Yet
nothing could be more desirable. For the worst fate that contemporary
poetry can have is to have any fate, however unarbitrary, with its
contemporaries. If the popular anthology were removed, if contemporary
poetry in general were removed as a subject of journalistic reference,
and the magazines devoted to such reference removed as well, there
might be nothing left but a few plainly printed volumes, to be found
out by those who were meant to find them out, exercising no persuasion
but that of being between their two covers, from line to line and page
to page, for whoever should happen to open them.
_By the Same Author_
CONTEMPORARIES
AND SNOBS
‘I knew it was a book about modernist poetry, and so I
made up my mind that it must be silly. Then I girded
up my loins and read the thing. Well, it wasn’t silly.
Miss Riding possesses intellectual power.’
ARNOLD BENNETT in _The Evening Standard_
‘Miss Riding is a very acute critic of the circumstances
of modern poetry.’
_Times Literary Supplement_
‘Her incidental criticisms (on Paul Valery, for instance,
and on Gertrude Stein and Poe) are so trenchant
and so illuminating.’
_The Observer_
‘The value and uniqueness of Miss Riding’s achievement
is that she attacks them and outlines an alternative mode
of thought in a book on the same level of intellectual
culture as their own.’
_The Yorkshire Post_
7s. 6d. net
_Jonathan Cape Thirty Bedford Square London_
FOOTNOTES
[1] The present Professor of Poetry at Oxford, diving gamely into the
waters of modernism, brought up only an old boot--Mr. Humbert Wolfe!
[2] A _Homage to Lindbergh_ anthology, contributed to by some two
hundred poets, has however recently been published.
[3] The recent _Sacco-Vanzetti_ anthology illustrates how very special
the anthology public may be.
[4] Mr. J. C. Squire has however appraised the market more cleverly in
bringing out an anthology of _Lesser Poets_ rather than of Lesser Poems.
[5] The most playful example of this sort of thing that we have
recently met with is the introduction to Mr. E. V. Lucas’s _Joy of
Life_. This production, divided into sections: ‘England,’ ‘The Changing
Year,’ ‘Birds,’ ‘The Garden,’ ‘The Game,’ ‘Sport,’ ‘Travel,’ ‘The Sea,’
‘Lovers,’ ‘Domesticity,’ ‘Children,’ ‘Books,’ ‘Philosophy,’ ‘Theology,’
‘Thanksgiving and Prayer,’ ‘The Land of Heart’s Desire,’ ‘Friends,’
‘The Old Days,’ ‘Wine,’ ‘Rapture,’ ‘Rest and Slumber,’ ‘Evening
Shadows,’ ‘Farewell,’ is explained as follows:
‘I do not pretend that the pages contain, as a whole, the best modern
poetry that I could find; but they contain the best modern poetry that
I could find with bearing upon my theme: the joy of life. English
poets since the war have more often been grave than gay, sardonic
than serene, yet I have been able to bend not a few even of the
more pessimistic to my cheerful purpose. I hope that none will feel
affronted when they see what has been done with them.’
Peep-bo! See what a fool I’ve made of you!
[6] _A Survey of Modernist Poetry_: Heinemann, 1927.
[7] W. E. Johnson, _Logic, Part III_, p. 6, quoted by R. B.
Braithwaite, _The Idea of Necessary Connexion_ (II), Mind, vol. xxxvii,
no. 145.
[8] Author of _Dreamland Shores_, _The Poet’s Life of Christ_, and _The
Podgy Book of Tales_.
[9] Longmans, Green & Co., 10_s._ 6_d._
[10] Mr. Humbert Wolfe, who defines all poetry as ‘prose in flight’
(the _New Criterion_), should have all his own poetry immediately flown
into France.
[11] The question of the relation of logic to poetry, and especially
of the difference between French and English poetry in this respect,
is discussed by Albert Thibaudet in the _Nouvelle Revue Française_,
January, 1928. English lyrical poetry, he says, is far removed from
everything logical, French lyrical poetry has an oratorical sympathy
with logic--‘_le flot oratoire roule sur la pente de la logique_.’
But he makes no distinction between sub-logical and supra-logical
oppositions to prose logic; between the pseudo-magical ‘best poems’ of
Poe and Swinburne, for example, and the ‘stimming’ though illogical
poems of Shelley and Shakespeare at their best. Mallarmé, reacting
under English and American influence against what M. Thibaudet calls
‘_l’intermédiaire oratoire, didactique, logique, qui s’interpose
toujours plus ou moins entre le poète français et la réalité
poétique_,’ improvised in the illogical Poe manner rather than in
the illogical Shakespeare manner. But as it is not in the French
nature to be supra-logical, so also they fail as sub-logicians: their
perfect modern lyrics are only scientific, synthetic imbecilities,
their sleight-of-prose is logical, not pseudo-magical. For better
or for worse no French poet could have achieved the sub-realistic
immateriality of _Inisfree_ or _Eldorado_.
[12] See preceding footnote.
[13] And more recently another Celtic Anthology by Mrs. Rhys on the
same lines.
[14] Or what is a Southerner? One of the authors of this book spent a
little over a year in Kentucky and has since been generally labelled a
Southern poet.
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