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There was a new anthology published recently, just in time for Christmas, about which British newspaper books pages have been obligingly enthusiastic. It’s The Penguin Book of Elegy, edited by Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan.
Sean O’Brien in the Telegraph judged that “the anthology is a success […] the editors’ introduction is excellent”; Kate Kellaway in the Observer praised “an exceptional anthology that is fascinating and unignorable”; while Susie Goldsborough in The Times made it sound like a delightful ambush on dark night: “if you have any weakness at all for poetry, this […] collection will draw you in, then decimate you”.
The reviewers all took the size of the book as a sign of form following content:
has the heft of a gravestone (Sean O’Brien)
gravestone-thick (Kate Kellaway)
this centuries-spanning, 600-page tombstone (Susie Goldsborough)
I agree with them that The Penguin Book of Elegy is an arm-breaker of a hardback. But in the Literary Review this month, I took a different view on its pound-for-pound value.
The Penguin Book of Elegy, ed. Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan, £40
Elegiac poetry deals primarily with mortality, so The Penguin Book of Elegy might be seen as the inevitable — if much-delayed — sequel to George MacBeth’s The Penguin Book of Sick Verse (1963). That was a quirky production, though, ranging from physical illness to sick jokes. This is a canonical one, which claims to be “the only comprehensive anthology of its kind in the English language”.
How to survey all the poetry that has ever been written about death? The editors’ introduction begins, alarmingly: “All poetry exists as a record of life snatched from the destructive flow of time, and so to some extent all poetry is elegiac.” You can see their point, but doesn’t that also make any work of art — any artefact — “elegiac”?
Originally a type of ancient Greek metrical couplet, the elegos came to be associated with songs of lament. In Latin, it evolved into the pastoral elegy, where shepherds mourn the deaths of mythical figures and the landscape mourns with them — a melancholic scenario that echoes through modern elegy: for example, when Linton Kwesi Johnson buries his father and laments how “country to town / is jus thistle an tawn”, or when Denise Riley tells her dead son that she wants to “shepherd you back within range”.
The introduction soon settles into a sober overview of this tradition. One wonders, in fact, if the origin of this anthology was a lecture series: both Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan have had long careers as professors in English departments, and there is a note of please-read-for-next-week inevitability about the way one literary monument points to another (“Hardy no doubt had In Memoriam in mind when he began to compose his own ‘Poems of 1912–13’”).
All of which is fine, if a little old-fashioned, and leads one to expect a neat graveyard of Great Poems, dotted with the minor, mossed-over verses that are the fun of an anthology. But the editors’ aspiration to comprehensiveness leads them to a grander claim. They have, they say, “brought together the best and most varied examples we can find of poems of loss and mourning written in English (and translated into English) between Classical antiquity and the present day”. If true, this is hardly less mind-blowing than the suggestion that all poetry is elegiac. A lifetime’s reading is implied by that parenthesis.
Of course, it’s not true — and the result is a comprehensive muddle. The cracks begin to show when the editors explain that their chronological introduction is going to be followed by poems arranged alphabetically by author. Shuffling the cards like this, they believe, “highlights [the] reciprocity” of elegy through the ages, while offering “surprise and delight”.
Personally, I’ve always found that opening an anthology at random does the trick if I feel like a surprise. So it’s hard not to feel that this abecedarian scheme is really a way to disguise the gap between ambition and reality.
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