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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 23 - 29 November 2000 Issue No.509 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 23 - 29 November 2000 Issue No.509
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain Talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
One has not had a chance to look at The New Penguin Book of English Verse, a much publicised editorial contribution by Paul Keegan that has just appeared in London. Yet, examining its reviews in the English press is sufficient to raise a number of important questions. A "1,184 page bumper anthology," as John Carey describes it in the Culture Supplement of the Sunday Times, the book demonstrates the art of compilation at its creative best. The poems are arranged not "in poet-by-poet batches" but chronologically, according to their date of publication. The "great metrical cataract" that thus evolves, Carey explains, allows one to "hear not Milton's voice or Wordsworth's but the voice of English poetry" as a whole.
Certainly, the pattern according to which an anthology is created is something that readers consider but rarely. Yet anthologies are invariably personal affairs, reflecting the standpoint of the editor and, to some extent, his or her taste. Coming across The New Penguin Book of English Verse, my mind fully engaged in its concept of arrangement, I found myself rushing to my bookshelves, searching furiously for Palgrave's Golden Treasury, the first poetry anthology I ever read, using it as a textbook during my school days and well into my university years. I also took out the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, acquired during a recent visit to the US. Each, it was soon to be reconfirmed in my mind, provides an excellent example of what an anthology can be. Each has its own poetic range, its method of approach and editorial conception. Both are completely absorbing reading experiences.
The Golden Treasury, with the interesting subtitle "Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language," has exercised enduring appeal over generations upon generations of poetry lovers and readers. First published in 1861, the book was reissued in 1907 and 1957 (the latter being my own copy's date of publication), and included previously uncollected poems in each new edition. Mine has T S Eliot, W H Auden, Rupert Brooke, Dylan Thomas.
In his preface, Turner Palgrave explains how his "little collection" differs from others in that it attempts to include "all the best original lyrical pieces and songs in our language, by writers not living, and none besides the best." Though he painstakingly attempts to define "lyrical" and "the best," Palgrave, leaves the dilemma as to how anthologies can be objective unresolved. His endeavour turns out to be as subjective as any. What I like about Palgrave's preface is the modest spirit in which he justifies not including living poets in the collection: simply, Palgrave did not think that it was possible to apply the standard aimed at to the living.
Edited by two well-known English professors, Richard Ellmann -- whose biography of James Joyce and his wonderful book on Yeats I have read and enjoyed immensely -- and Robert O'Clair, The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, with its excellent prefaces, introductions and notes, aspires, in contrast to The Golden Treasury, to present the best of many poets working in English in the past 75 years. These, the anthology tells us, "have written in an unprecedented range of styles and subjects." The editors concede that modern poetry is difficult to define. The time when "innovations we call modern" were first introduced, they conclude, must date back to the Romantic movement of the 19th century. It was Romanticism, they say, that "offered sanction for a more copious and diversified expression of the self, for more various relations between the individual and society," and for, let us not forget, the stunning compilation at hand.
Containing younger names with which one is less familiar than those in Palgrave's classic -- like Richard Wilbur, Josephine Miles and Cathy Song (born 1955), to mention but three examples -- this is a refreshing and invigorating read, however strange it may seem at first, and further demonstrates that stunning range of possibilities available to the editor of an anthology.
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