(c) 1999, Times NewspapersThe Oxford Book of English Verse

Doc ref: TLS-1999-1015             Date: October 15, 1999             (Page 27, 1 of 1).

T his hefty and handsome anthology appears almost a hundred years after Arthur Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of

English Verse (1900) - a widely loved work which sold half a million copies before "Q" revised it in 1939, and which remains in print to this day, despite the rival publication of Helen Gardner' s New Oxford Book in 1972. Whether Ricks's innovative volume will be on sale a cen­tury from now depends on such imponderables as the future of English as a world language and the probable decline of print in the face of elec­tronic technology, but his publishers have spared no effort in giving his book a good start in life. Stoutly bound in blue and gold, and wrapped in a parchment-thick jacket adorned with quill pens, the facsimile of a Shakespeare sonnet, and what looks like National Trust wall­paper, this is scholarship as heritage object, mar­keted with one eye on the academy but the other on mail-order book clubs.

"Q" gratified his readers by weaving garlands of lyrics and epigrams; his book avoids narra­tive, satire and anything too argumentative. Untroubled by thoughts of textual integrity, he pruned passages that displeased him and pre­sented extracts as whole poems. Though he took his cue in much of this from that great Vic­torian compendium, Palgrave's Golden Treas­ury, he must have realized that his preferences echoed those of the founding anthologists of European and English culture: Meleager of Gadara and Philippus of Thessalonica, who gathered wreaths of elegiac epigrams in the first centuries BC and AD, and the sixteenth-century editors who put together Totters Songes and Sonettes, The Paradyse of Daynty Devises and A Gorgious Gallery of Gallant Inventions.

Helen Gardner was more inclusive. Where "Q" chose only "the best", she felt a pedagogi­cal urge to "represent the range of non-dramatic English poetry". If a precedent were sought for her New Oxford Book, it would be found not in Renaissance miscellanies but in the later, chron­ologically arranged collections that established a poetic canon for the middle-class reading pub­lic, from Thomas Hayward' s The British Muse (1738) to Hazlitt's Select Poets of Great Britain (1825). More immediately, Gardner was stead­ied in her task by the climate of opinion created by T. S. Eliot. His influence is clear in her bias towards metaphysical poetry and modernism, but it also seems to inform her vision of English poetry as a connected whole in which the shock of individual talent reanimates tradition.

Christopher Ricks steps into a scene that is altogether more fragmentary and fractious, not just because "the best" and "tradition" are now routinely denounced as categories invented and policed by power groups, but because recent anthologies have at once narrowed and hugely extended the territory which an Oxford Book of English Verse could be expected to occupy. On the one hand, such annotated course-books as the Norton and Arnold anthologies have cor­nered the educational market, providing valua­ble though initiative-sapping guides to the liter­ary past. On the other, revisionist scholars have used anthologies to bring to light huge quanti­ties of verse by women, black writers, labourers and so forth, and thus expanded almost unman­ageably the amount of material which an editor must include if he is to "represent the range".

No friend of those who engage in canon war­fare, Ricks roundly declares, in his Essays ill Appreciation (1996), that "there are writers, past and present, who are not 'marginalized' but marginal". Yet the edgy, mannered prose of the preface to his Oxford Book suggests that he is acutely self-conscious about the present diffi­culties of his task. And although he maintains a diplomatic silence about quotas, he selects three times as many women as Helen Gardner (though only, at thirty, half-a-dozen more than

POETRY

As the thrushes do JOHN KERRIGAN

Christopher Ricks, editor

THE OXFORD BOOK OF ENGLISH VERSE

69Opp. Oxford University Press. £25. 0192141821

"Q", who was no sort of feminist). Some of the newly promoted, such as the eighteenth-century Mary Leapor and Frances Greville, strike me as more marginal than marginalized, but others, including Anne Finch and Charlotte Mew, are substantial figures, whose exclusion by Gardner now seems scandalous. In those cases, Ricks has nothing to do with tokenism and allows them several poems each.

In fact, a lyric by Mew is one of three poems reprinted on the back flap of the Oxford Book:

I so liked Spring last year Because you were here; -

The thrushes too -Because it was these you so liked to hear -

1 so liked you.

This year's a different thing, -I'll not think of you.

But I'll like Spring because it is simply Spring As the thrushes do.

This delicate study in commonplace feeling earns its place because of rather than despite its proximity to platitude, keeping on the move away from cliche by its asymmetrical recur­rences and rhymes that touch and go. By snap­ping it up, Ricks shows that, although his tastes are much more catholic, he has as sharp an ear as "Q" for the particular pleasures of lyric.

The other two poems on the jacket are equally indicative. One is Keats's sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" - that ecstatic response to the new vistas that translation opens up. Ricks says in his preface that "Much of the supreme poetry in our language has always been translation", and he acts on this with unprecedented vigour by including several dozen poems and passages not just from predict­able tongues (Latin, Greek, Italian) but from Polish, Japanese, Persian and more. The third poem on the back flap - "Boys and girls come out to play, / The moon doth shine as bright as day ... " - is calculated to reassure punters that, though Ricks has not included pop songs or advertising jingles, he likes the poetry of every­day life. As his preface mincingly puts it: "Newly figuring are the dear daily kinds of verse: nursery rhymes (a loved glory of English culture), limericks, and clerihews."

The sharpest attack on anthologizing was mounted long before the canon wars got started. In their Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928), Laura Riding aad Robert Graves savage editors for poaching each other's selections, for strip­ping poems of their "original contexts" and blur­ring them into sameness: ''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." While they don't go so far as to say that "every poem in The Golden Treasury" is false to the person that wrote it, they do insist that "even positive poems lose character by being anthologized". Shorn of their formative settings, such poems can only assert their individuality by trading on their most obvi­ous features. The conversation between them becomes competitive and unsubtle. Riding and Graves imagine James Shirley's ''The glories of our blood and state" boasting "I have the best beginning", while Thomas Hood's "I remem­ber, 1 remember" replies "I appeal to the Univer­sal Heart of Man", and Yeats's "Innisfree" clears the room by insisting "My bloke's still alive and he's got the Nobel Prize for being the best poet IN THE WORLD".

I t is a measure of Ricks's achievement that the Riding-Graves critique passes him by. Though his seventeenth-century choices

often coincide with Helen Gardner's, the overall selection is firmly his own, and not at all homo­geneous. Finding room for such must-have clas­sics as "Lycidas" and "Kubla Khan", he vigi­lantly excludes pieces that familiarity has made stale - even where that means leaving out the texts identified by BBC pollsters as "the nation's favourite poems": Kipling's "If', ''The Lady of Shalott" and Walter de la Mare's ''The Listen­ers". Up to about 1945, he shows a fine ability to select poems that are characteristic of their authors yet surprising, distinctive without being self-parodic. And if there's sometimes a whiff of perversity about his neglect of obvious merit (hardly any Thomas Carew, Dylan Thomas deprived of "Fern Hill"), he gives his readers a feast that is satisfying as well as spectacular.

After 1945, the Oxford Book goes astray. In his preface, Ricks admits "that most of us are not good at appreciating the poetry of those appreciably younger than we are", and explains that he will therefore stop his selection with Seamus Heaney (b. 1939). This makes good enough sense; it isn't compulsory to trawl through Simon Annitage et al. But Ricks misconstructs post-war poetry around Henry Reed, Donald Davie and Philip Larkin, and dis­torts the evolved work of poets of his own gener­ation: Ted Hughes, for instance, is represented by four animal poems from Lupercal (1960), with nothing from such landmark later books as Crow and Birthday Letters.

There is a pattern to these misjudgments. Just as "Q", revising the Oxford Book in 1939, resisted modernism, so Ricks fails to register its ongoing vitality. There is something badly wf0ng with an anthology which includes five pieces by Anthony Thwaite and nothing from

merryholly bappyjolly j 0 11 y j ell y ....

This provides a minor diversion, but standing by itself it makes an inventive aJld various poet look like a one-off stunt-man.

Lovers of cricket and warm beer might balk at finding Morgan - a bolshie Scot with a Welsh-sounding name - in a book of "English verse", not to mention finding Heaney given pride of place at the end of it, but the Oxford Book's inclusion policy has always been elastic.·" "Q" took the word "English" in his title to mean anglophone in a broad sense, and admitted Longfellow and Whitman. By 1972, this policy was unsustainable, and, on grounds of bulk if no other, Helen Gardner excluded all Americans except Ezra Pound. Noticing that this threw "English" back on to a national defini­tion, she sought in her preface to placate the Scots for putting the "dialect" poetry of Burns into the canon of English verse, but held larger complications at bay by saying nothing to the Welsh and Irish. The fact that her selection was so Anglocentric - no Henryson, no Allan Ram- ... say, no Young Ireland poets - allowed her in some measure to gloss over the problem.

Ricks is properly alert to the awkwardness of his inherited title, but he mistakenly attempts to rationalize it in his preface. It would be a shame if the resulting muddles and provocations were to distract from his practical efforts at literary devolution. His is the first Oxford Book adequately to mark out the relations between English and Scottish poetry, and the generosity of his selection from Anglo-Welsh changes the twentieth-century picture. The complicated legacies of anglophone writing in Ireland claim less of his attention, but it is good to have so much Austin Clarke (partly as a translator) as well as three pages of Thomas Kinsella. A troubling footnote tells us that Ricks's Irish plans were thwarted when a dispute between the estate and the brother of Patrick Kavanagh prevented the inclusion of ''The Great Hunger" (all of it?), "Sanctity", "Epic" and ''Come Dance with Kitty Stobling".

The peculiarities of Professor Ricks's policy are most apparent when he ranges beyond ''the British isles". Though he makes a point of includ­ing post-independence poetry from the Irish Republic, he uses independence as a cut-off date for work from the American states and the Brit­ish Empire or Commonwealth. Having thus made way for poems from early modern New England by Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet, " on the grounds that they "take part in the making of English literature", he risks the charge of double standards by excluding verse from pre­independence India, the Caribbean and else­where on the similar-sounding grounds that it "had not achieved poetic independence". What makes this the less convincing is that Ricks con­tradicts it himself by including a lyric by Derek Walcott - a poem published a decade and half before Walcott's St Lucia became independent.

These confusions impinge on what is, for several reasons, the least satisfactory part of this anthology: the "Introduction: Of English Verse". Given his devolving instincts, it is odd "T that Ricks should start this piece by trying to identify what is English about English verse. He takes his cue from Ezra Pound's assertion

Ricks has boldly rewritten the Oxford antholo­gist's rulebook. At several points, for instance, he prints two versions of a poem, focusing atten­tion on the minutiae of verbal artistry, and making readers aware that other poems in the anthology, which seem final on the page, may also be "tentative entities". More questionably, he includes dramatic verse. He may be right to say that Gardner is inconsistent when she keeps out playhouse speeches while letting in songs and hymns, but it's asking too much of even this boa-constrictor of a book to digest the corpus of verse drama on top of everything else. In practice, Ricks selects only from plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, which is to lock the stable door before the horse has got halfway out, ignoring the dramatic achieve­ments of Shelley and Joanna Baillie, not to mention Yeats and Eliot.

Basil Bunting's Briggflatts, which finds room r-----------------for U. A. Fanthorpe but not for David Jones, W. S. Graham, Christopher Middleton or Roy Fisher. Ricks's only concession is Edwin Morgan's ''The Computer' s First Christmas Card" , which runs down the page like a print­out, in a strip of letterist experimentalism:

- 27 -

jollymerry hollyberry jollyberry

Poetry of PETER NICHOLSON A Tnaporary Gnee 1111

Such Sweet TJIIUldcr 19M • A DwdliDI Place 1117 WILLINGTON LANE Puss

Distributed by Home Grown Boot. Tel: ~12 9360 5312 Fax: ~12 9360 1968

email : isbinlitozemail.com.au bttp:llpetemlcllolloa.bytaerve.aIID.au

TLS O CTOBER 15 1999

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(c) 1999, Times NewspapersThe Oxford Book of English Verse

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POETRY

that "art ... has found on the island . .. hardly more than a race conviction that words scarcely become a man". Pound supports this generaliza­tion about the reticence of the race by invoking two Anglo-Saxon poems that make some use of understatement, ''The Wanderer" and "The Sea­farer"; but his views were no doubt formed by his encounters, as a boisterous American, with the buttoned-up late Victorians he found in Edwardian London. As an account of the sensi­l>ilities that inform Piers Plowman, Tom Jones ;.. Don Juan, his thesis is a non-starter, and Ricks seems to concede its historically limited relevance when he ends his introduction by tying it to In Memoriam: "I sometimes hold it half a sin / To put in words the grief I feel ... ".

Poems after Pushkin

It has to be admitted that the editors of other Oxford Books have been no more successful in locating the quick of Englishness. If they write in a time of crisis they distort the evidence - as "Q" did, in 1939, when impending war encour­aged him to find a "note of valiancy ... domi­nant throughout" his selection. And if they have

-4isure to reflect, they are likely to conclude -with A. S. Byatt in The Oxford Book of English Short Stories - that Englishness is incorrigibly multiple: '''There is English empiricism, English pragmatism, English starkness, English humour, English satire, English dandyism ... ". Given the impossibility of doing much better than that in his dozen pages, it is understandable that Ricks should swiftly drop his attempt to define the national genius and use the bulk of his introduc­tion to discuss the appreciation of verse.

Of all the scholar-critics active today, Ricks is probably the best equipped to prepare readers for a bare-page encounter with poetry. On this occasion, however, he chooses to muse on quo­tations from Jonson, Dryden, Dr Johnson, c;Qleridge, Matthew Arnold and Eliot. Modesty may have encouraged him to withdraw in this way, but his "points of principle enunciated by the supreme poet-critics" are also plainly a fusil­lade in the campaign that he began years ago in his essay on "Literary Principles as against Theory" (1985). It is unfortunate that the Oxford Book should be caught up in a dated academic battle, given the immediate needs of its audience, and frustrating that Ricks should allow his introduction to be sidetracked into a discussion of the qualities that make a good critic. Of course, he is able to show that John­son and the rest were acute and trenchant crit­ics, who raise points of lasting importance, but ~ cannot use them to illuminate the questions that are in the air for contemporary (and espe­cially younger) readers - about verse as an infor­mation technology, about poetry and consumer­ism, ethnicity and gender roles.

Arion We were all hard at it in the boat, Some of us up tightening sail, Some down at the heave and haul Of the rowing benches, deeply cargoed, Steady keeled, our passage silent, The helmsman buoyant at the helm; And I, who took it all for granted, Sang to the sailors.

Then turbulent Sudden wind, a maelstrom; The helmsman and the sailors perished. Only I, still singing, washed Ashore by the long sea-swell, sing on, A mystery to my poet self, And safe and sound beneath a rock shelf Have spread my wet clothes in the sun.

SEAMUS HEANEY

When and Where Where the big crowds come, the street, the stadium, the park where the young go crazy to the beat and the heated bubble of the song,

thoughts running loose, I tell myself, the years will have blipped past, one by one the lot of us here present will be gone into the dark. Someone's last

hour's always next, right here and now. Deep under the bark of that great oak my father's lifetime's told in rings, which grow to outlive me too. Gently as I stroke

this child's head, I'm thinking, "Goodbye!" It's all yours now, the season's crop-your time to bud, and bloom, while my late leaves wither and drop -

And which day of which year to come will turn out to have been the anniversary, distant or near, of my death? Good question. The scene,

will it be wartime, on a trip, or at home or in some nearby street, crashed coach or a ship­wreck that I'm to die?

Cadavers couldn't care less where they rot, yet the living tissue leans (as best it may) toward the long-loved familiar spot for its rest. Mine does, think of it that way.

Freshly dug. Young things, chase your ball. Nature's not watching, only minding by its own light perpetual beauty of its own fact or finding.

ALLEN CURNOW

"Please God, let me not lose my mind" Please God, let me not lose my mind For I would rather be a pilgrim

Or a poor working lad Not because I set much store On sanity. In fact I could

Cheerfully go mad.

If they would only let me be Gladly I would at once seek out

Some group of shadowy trees And sing with crazy vehemence Abandoning myself to nights

Of glorious fantasies.

And I would listen to the sea And I would look up with delight

Into a hollow sky I would be fierce I would be free A hurricane uprooting fields

And making forests lie.

There is a snag: you lose your wits And people shun you like the pox

And lock you in a cell. Lunatics are put in chains. And creatures indescribable

Will come to give you hell.

And after dark I should not hear The singing of the nightingale

Nor any rustling leaf But my fellow inmates screaming And the wardens' night shift swearing.

Clanking chains. And grief.

PA TRICIA BEER (1924-1999)

"I loved you once" I loved you once. If love is fire, then embers smoulder in the ashes of this heart. Don't be afraid. Don't worry. Don't remember. I do not want you sad now we're apart.

I loved you without language, without hope, now mad with jealousy, now insecure. I loved you once so purely, so completely, I know who loves you next can't love you more.

CAROL ANN DUFFY

"The season's last flowers yield" The season's last flowers yield More than those first in the field. The thoughts they rouse, sharp, sweet, Have an incomparable power. Likewise, the parting hour As against when we merely meet.

CHRISTOPHER REID

None of this would be an issue,·had Ricks fol­lowed the logic of the first sentence of his intro­duction: "Poems in an anthology are best left to do what poems are particularly good at: speak­ing for themselves." He could have followed "Q" and Gardner in confIning himself to a pref­ace devoted to explaining his procedures. It is fmally admirable, however, that he should have overcome his misgivings and seized an opportu­nity to guide readers, without sinking to the ~i>oon-feeding of the Norton and Arnold anthol­ogies. Where he fails as a helper, he mostly does so by overestimating his audience and run­ning into inconsistency - as when he glosses medieval, Scottish and dialect poems but leaves unexplained titles and epigraphs in Greek, Latin, Spanish, Rabelaisian French and Dantesque Italian. To that extent his Oxford Book pays the honourable price of refusing to dumb down. And whatever doubts may attach to the editorial apparatus, his selection of poems is rewardingly the work of an exceptional critic. After Pushkin: Versions of the poems by Alexander Pushkin by contemporary poets, edited by Elaine Feinstein with a preface by Marita Crawley

(96pp. Hardback, £22.50), is published this month by the Folio Society. To order a copy, contact the Folio Society at 44 Eagle Street, London fohn Kerrigan is the author of Revenge WCIR 4FS (telephone 0171 400 42(0). Eight of the featured poets and the actor Ralph Fiennes will read from the book at the Purcell Room, Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (1996). South Bank Centre, London SEI at 7.30 pm on November 22.

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