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Poetry anthologies with their cheap, too-white paper and unattractive, incompetently set type, poetry anthologies with their hysterical and deceiving blurbs, poetry anthologies with their deranged forewords, often produced under duress
Sam Riviere, Dead Souls
This week I’ve been reviewing a new poetry anthology, which has got me thinking about the problems an anthology editor faces. The poetry critic Dana Gioia once defined an anthology as “a book that omits your favourite poem”, and inevitably the anthology reviewer ends up sharing their own roll-call of omissions, modestly revealing in the process their own taste and erudition.
Since editing an anthology myself, though, I’m more interested in the question of how you shape an anthology to include the broadest range of poems (not just your favourites, or anyone else’s), while making something coherent and useful to the curious reader. This sent me back to my review of The Twentieth Century in Poetry for the Literary Review in 2011. I was quite hard on its exclusion of the avant-garde, but there were also things I valued, such as the inclusion of Australasian poets. There’s also an early stirring of the wish to see prose poems recognised as poems, which eventually led me to edit The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018). Here is that review.
The Twentieth Century in Poetry, edited by Michael Hulse and Simon Rae, Ebury Press, £25
In his 1908 “Lecture on Modern Poetry”, the modernist critic T.E. Hulme described the relationship between poetry and prose as the origin of cliché: “One might say that images are born in poetry. They are used in prose, and finally die a long, lingering death in journalists’ English.” The Twentieth Century in Poetry illustrates the process starkly. The first poem of the book, Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” (dated “31 December 1900”) is a prophetic lament which expresses, with bleak surrealism, a vision of modern history as a mass grave: “The land’s sharp features seemed to be / The Century’s corpse outleant”. Compare the melancholy originality of Hardy’s “good-night air”, though, with the breezy prose of his latest anthologisers:
[In 1901] Queen Victoria had died… bringing to an end the age to which she gave her name… as the more than middle-aged Prince of Wales mounted the throne after his marathon wait to succeed, his subjects hoped for a breath of fresh air. The great glacier of Victorian social attitudes had been showing cracks for some years…
And so it goes on, with a version of history since 1900 that veers unconsciously close to the simplistic schoolbook explanations of 1066 and All That (“Edward VII was quite old when he came to the throne, but this was only on account of Queen Victoria”). Worse still, poets and poems get the same brisk treatment. “Retired novelist Thomas Hardy greeted the twentieth century with characteristic pessimism” is a voiceover that drowns the actual “trembled” note of “The Darkling Thrush”, and its expression of what Hardy more subtly called his “evolutionary meliorism”.
As T.E. Hulme conceded, prose tends to cliché because it sometimes has to be written “almost without thinking”, as “an economy of effort”. It seems only fair to conclude that Michael Hulse and Simon Rae, both poets themselves, had exhausted themselves after compiling this large and largely enjoyable anthology. The majority of poems are good to excellent, and the minority are at least worth reading once. The distinction between the two, however, points to the incoherence of the overall arrangement, which pigeonholes individual poems in specific years.
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