Where to begin? The first challenge of a chronological
anthology. Where Palgrave runs from (approximately) Shakespeare to Shelley,
Gardner’s sweep is broader: from Anon (in a mediaeval prelude to Chaucer) to Fern Hill, written a couple of months
after WWII. The poem by Anon is, appropriately, called ‘Cuckoo Song’ (also known by its first line: Summer is y-comen in’).
All poems in anthologies are sorts of cuckoos: not only in their marking of
time, their mechanical chimes jolting out between periods of silence and
omissions; but also in their encroachment, their competition for place. All
poems could not have happened, so their presence, in a summation of what did happen, carries a trace of that accident.
‘These fragments I have shored against my ruin’, in Eliot’s words from The Waste Land (included whole). But it’s
also a particular version: for every poem that’s in, there’s one that has been
pushed from the nest.
That joyful shout ‘summer is y-comen in!’ is an uplifiting
place to start. Or, in the version of this poem, which is also called the ‘Reading Rota’ and is mounted on the
walls of the ruined abbey in my home town: ‘sumer is icomen in’. There are
variant reading (mis-Readings?) even where we start. But of course, this isn’t
really the start. To summarise English verse without Angle-isch verse is itself
a mis-reading: where is Beowulf, The
Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Ruin? Lost at sea, perhaps… Too difficult? (See
also the domesticated, truncated. modernised version of Chaucer, the eight line
chunk of Langland). Anon continues to be prolific, in fits and starts: a
mediaeval burst, some renaissance songs and then a late flourish to round out
this strange career of C17th and C18th ballads. Everything after that is known
and labelled (and, with eight brief exceptions, male).
Such anthologies serve some writers better than others, even
amongst those that are included (we could note that English seems nationally or
ethnically drawn, rather than based on the language, although we could then
note the presence of Welsh and Scottish interlopers. Perhaps it should say ‘British’
– but how then to justify Joyce and Yeats’ inclusion? or the troublesome pair
of Eliot and Pound?). Poetry that relates to an English poetic world, perhaps. In
this, at least, it seems the Angles are here in force, along with the Anglicans
represented in the middle of the volume. The selections are most unusual and quixotic
in Gardner’s own areas of specialism: not just Eliot, but metaphysical poets.
Aurelian Townshend makes an appearance. But later on, the list of names on the
honour-boards are more predictable.
Most of Keats’, Coleridge’s and, later, Dylan Thomas’ best
work is included. This format suits those who are only exceptionally
exceptional, with careers cut short by death, addictions or both. The
prominence Keats’ short career achieves in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury is surely one reason for his high reputation today
(and indeed, the shape of our whole conception of the English canon: in wide-ranging
lyric anthologies, minor lyricists and brief careers loom large).
More difficult to represent are the poets with longer, more
complex poetic projects, such as Chaucer, Wordsworth, Pound. Although all are
represented – sometimes at length – their work is cut down for size. The Prelude is delivered in two sections
that are shorter than the (startlingly) absent ‘Tintern Abbey’. A page of Canto
81, unlabelled other than ‘from the Pisan Cantos’ gives no wider sense of
its location (either within the cage in the detention centre at Pisa, or as
part of a decades-long set of over a hundred long works). As the quoted section
ends: ‘Here error is all in the not done, / all in the diffidence that faltered’.
We are left with the climax without the build-up; and cathedrals shown at the
same scale as cottages.
The balancing of scale in a historical anthology is always
going to be difficult: the Victorian era (Tennyson, Robert Browning and
Christina Rossetti aside) is perhaps not the high point, but there are plenty
of ‘significant’ figures who need to be included (although one could question
having seven pages of George Meredith and none of David Jones, or Charlotte
Smith). In a poem, the form can follow the content: in a chronological
anthology there are times when there are verses, or periods, that need to be
filled.
Nearer the present, the
selections are briefer, as if more tentative about reputations (or generous
with opportunities). But as our present gets further from the present of its
first publication, in 1972, we could make our own readjustments. The final
poem, by MacNeice, speaks of ‘a cloud of witnesses’, but an anthology, like a
cuckoo, like a war, thins out that crowd (all poets included were already
either dead in war like Keith Douglas, or born before 1914). ‘What thou lovest
well remains’, Pound wrote (in that short section of The Cantos included here). But we can perhaps be forgiven for finding this selection limiting and hoping that more that these few survive, that our love can be more inclusive: a
living monument.
