Irish Review (Dublin)

The New AnthologyAuthor(s): Thomas MacDonaghSource: The Irish Review (Dublin), Vol. 4, No. 41 (Jul. - Aug., 1914), pp. 278-280Published by: Irish Review (Dublin)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30063322 .

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THE NEW ANTHOLOGY

BY THOMAS MAcDONAGH

A BAD book of verse, by a single author or by a few, should,

I believe, be left to its fate. It would be criminal to praise it, it would be useless to blame it. If the author

has anything in him, he will see the faults of his poor book, and will blame himself more bitterly than anyone else could. To try to produce a good book of poems is to try to do a great thing, and, as John Keats said in pleading to be left alone by those who would find fault with Endymion, " there is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object." A weak first book of poems does not prove that an author has nothing in him, witness Byron and Shelley. If he has something in him scathing criticism may discourage him, making him feel ridiculous. If he has nothing in him he will come to nothing ultimately. A bad book of verse, weak or dull or puerile or pompous or preachy or something else, a book of subject and treatment, with verses about the moon's reflection in water, or the evening sun seen through trees or the nightingale " unseen minstrel," or the friends of long ago, or any of all the other truly poetic things -such a book of verse should, I believe, be left alone, as Keats wished his beautiful book to be left. I, who have hitherto never written a criticism of a book that I could not praise, shall always leave such alone. But there is another kind of book, still of bad verse, which I think it my common duty to blame and to blame with reason and instance. The author, especially the young poet, who gathers his poems into a little book, wrongs only himself if the poems are poor and weak. Leave him alone. But the man, especially the poet, who with patience and confidence gathers into a book hundreds of poems, by a large number of poets good and bad, wrongs not himself but the poets, and not only the good poets but poetry itself, if any large number of these poems be poor and weak.

Most of the poems in the new anthology, Mr. Padric Gregory's Modern Anglo-Irish Verse,* are bad. As an anthology the book itself is bad. It is, once again, not an attempt to put together a body of good poems, chosen for their own beauty, but an attempt to represent all sorts and conditions of poets, by characteristic pieces, in some cases by what Mr. Gregory thought the best work of the poets, in some by the best he could get.

Some years ago, in writing of Mr. John Cooke's Dublin Book

*London: David Nutt. Six Shillings net.

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THE NEW ANTHOLOGY

of Irish Verse, I stated what seemed to me the only justification for this method of representing authors-the only justification for such books as Mr. Cooke's and the Brooke-Rolleston Treasury of Irish Poetry. These are records of the rise and progress of Anglo-Irish literature in verse. Some of the writers are more important than their work. Poems of little intrinsic value have an historic value. But in the case of a book like Mr. Gregory's, compiled from the work of contemporary authors, no such justification can be allowed.

A justification of another kind he claims in his Introduction, but so weakly that it is not worth refuting. If Mr. Gregory, owing to certain difficulties which he mentions, was not able to compile a book of good poetry all through, he should have given up the task and compiled nothing at all. "A space of two hundred years," he says, " is surely insufficient for a nation to produce two hundred great poems in an alien tongue." And then he proceeds to print two hundred and fifty poems produced within twenty years, or a little more. Who on earth wanted Mr. Gregory to produce this book? He has rendered a poor service to his country, to his con- temporaries, and to himself.

The book contains two hundred and fifty poems, by sixty-nine poets, including Lord Dunsany's two prose poems, which serve as prologue and epilogue. The poems run to well over seven thousand seven hundred lines - a book of four hundred pages. I have studied it diligently. I have considered every poem in it. Omitting altogether from both counts the nine poems of my own which it contains, of over four hundred lines, I find that, out of two hundred and forty-one poems, by sixty-eight authors, seven thousand three hundred lines, there are fifty-two good poems, the work of thirty authors, one thousand five hundred and eighty lines, and one hundred and eighty-nine poor, worthless poems, running to five thousand seven hundred lines odd. So a book one-fifth the size of this would have been better. If to the fifty-two good poems printed here were added poems by Alice Milligan, Susan Mitchell, Padraic Colum, Joseph Campbell, James Stephens, and some others omitted from this anthology through no fault of Mr. Gregory's, an anthology of a quarter or perhaps a third the size of this could be made which would do honour to contemporary Anglo-Irish poetry.

It is unnecessary to dwell further on the faults of the book, but one has to mention the shocking amount of misprints and mis- spellings-The Paternoster of Mr. Cannon by Shane Leslie, for the Cannon, and Moria O'Neill for Moira all through the book-the frequent incongruity of poems grouped together, the uselessness of the mottoes from English authors prefixed to the sections.

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THE IRISH REVIEW

To judge by this book, by the Introduction, by these mottoes and the general choice of poems, Mr. Gregory does not seem to be a man of wide reading. He is young, however, and his original work is full of promise. It is a pity he has lost valuable time on this collection. If he has been paid for it, he has his reward: one cannot think of a more terrible thing to say of a poet.

But this is not the last word to say. To Mr. Gregory's credit must be put a few valuable discoveries. Francis Macnamara's Carol and Sylvia Lynd's To My Children are beautiful poems which some of us did not know. Among the best things in the book are the ballads. Mr. Gregory has a fine feeling for ballad poetry, and one is thankful for the inclusion of Lady Gilbert's Fairy Earl and P. W. Joyce's Old Hermit. For the rest, the fact that here stands out, strong and beautiful, poems which in Miss Eleanor Hull's Poem Book of the Gael were not distinguished, suggests a comment on the superiority of the poetry translated from the Irish over all but the best original Anglo-Irish poems. Miss Hull's book, for instance, with its many faults and weaknesses, is a far finer book of poetry than even the good fifth part of this.

(A personal note: It may seem ungenerous in me to blame Mr. Gregory's book, as more honour is done to me in it than to any other author. but this makes it all the more my duty to give my true opinion. The choice of my poems seemed to me so good that the book has been a shocking disappointment to me. I thought that Mr. Gregory would have done as well by all the others. Personally I have nothing to complain of but that I should be so courteously thanked " for kindly interest in the work and generous help." I willingly gave permission for the use of my work, when I thought Mr. Gregory was making a good anthology. Before that I had written bluntly to him as I have written here of him and his work. I am sorry it is not good).

NOTE. It has been found advisable to combine the July and August numbers of the " Irish Review." Subscribers will, of course, receive their full complement of copies.

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