A Parade of Poets

Anthologies can be, for poets and their readers, but especially for poets, source books where they learn an attitude and a style of thought. England’s Parnassus, compiled by Robert Allot in 1600, was one such, and The Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by Michael Roberts and first published in 1936, another. It helped to shape the style of a generation.

A solar energy rises from these pages, a confidence in myth-making, suchpage 738 as we are not likely to see again – for I think it came from the Leftist assur- ance of being the favourite children of earth and history, now broken and shown to be an euphoric exaggeration. Yet an ill-based confidence may lead to excellent works of art, and Michael Roberts chose from good poets some of the best they had written.

There are a few obviously bad apples in the crate – Hopkins’s ‘The Candle Indoors’, T.F. Hulme’s ‘The Embankment’, Wallace Stevens’s ‘Tea at the Palaz of Hoon’, Wilfred Owens’s ‘Greater Love’ (a poem expressing, not describing war hysteria), most of Laura Riding, Edith Sitwell’s ‘The Bat’, William Empson’s ‘Invitation to Juno’, a good deal of Stephen Spender, all but one of Charles Madge’s poems, and David Gascoigne’s surrealist confection – it is worthwhile pointing them out, to show that Roberts’s book never amounted to Holy Writ. His mistakes were those of the academic man taken in by elaborate word-games or else by the subtly sentimental job.

But Donald Hall, by contrast, tends to choose the poorest poems available from the tamest poets, except where some modern classic obtrudes itself under his nose – as in the case of Robert Lowell’s ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’. I do not find his selection wholly unreadable. I am grateful for one charming short poem by James Dickey, called ‘The Heaven of Animals’, which gave me some illicit comfort lately when my tomcat died of a bladder infection. But either most poets since the Thirties have been carving cherry- stones, or Mr Hall thinks they have and likes it. I don’t think they have. Mr Hall has added a poor gloss to a book that was great in its way.

The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Verse is a far livelier collection: though it has its dead patches and its flashes of eccentricity. One could do without William Bell, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Rupert Brooke, A.E. Coppard, C.M. Doughty James Elroy Flecker, W.S. Graham, Brian Higgins, Wyndham- Lewis, Edgell Richword, Dorothy Wellesley and Charles Williams – some have had a good hearing already in the high school anthologies, and some show the editors’ inveterate liking for curios.

But there are a number of magnificent revelations and discoveries. The selection from W.H. Auden is impeccable. They have opened the door to the small but real best of Chesterton and Kipling, and resurrected those two biting satires, John Davidson’s ‘Thirty Bob a Week’ and James Joyce’s ‘The Holy Office’. Perhaps there is too much of Hugh MacDiarmid’s philosophising, but a little of it was a good idea. The only thundering mistake is Robert Nichol’s coy, arch, awkward poem, ‘Harlot’s Catch’. The selection from Edith Sitwell includes some of her best and none of her worst. One feels that the editors are not solely interested in the development of the English language. Human behaviour plays a part in this book. I prefer it that way.

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