Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture by Clare Bucknell review
This is a dazzling book — the more so because it is its author’s first. Clare Bucknell, a literary scholar who writes for serious periodicals such as The London Review of Books, has studied the influence on British society of poetry anthologies, from the early compendiums of the 17th century to modern treasuries that frame poetry as a way to soothe 21st-century stress. Her argument is that anthologies (the treasuries of her title) constitute our culture. That is, they are the essence of what we “habitually think and feel”.
Arguably, Bucknell’s early chapters should have been omitted on this reckoning. Her first, for example, is devoted to the four-volume Poems on Affairs of State, which started publication in the 1690s, and targets the goings-on at Charles II’s court and Britain’s shameful losses in the Dutch Wars — events that clearly belong to history and not to what we think and feel.
However, her thesis gains force with the first of the anthologies she surveys that could be called generally familiar: The Golden Treasury (1861), subtitled The Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, which came to define Victorian popular taste. The editor was Francis Turner Palgrave, and The Golden Treasury was revised by Tennyson towards the end of the century and later by Cecil Day-Lewis. Among Palgrave’s significant inclusions were Keats’s Ode to Autumn and Wordsworth’s Lucy poems, which generations of schoolchildren would come to learn by heart.
Palgrave’s life did not follow the pattern that his work as an English anthologist might suggest. He studied Latin from the age of four and started Greek when he was seven. This should remind us that in previous centuries “the educated”, that is boys who had attended public or grammar schools, would have been encouraged to learn Latin or Greek verse, not English.
However, Bucknell shows that Palgrave was by no means wrapped up in the past. Judging from the extensive annotation Palgrave included in his Treasury, he intended to influence taste, not just record it. A revolutionary in many ways, he had a keen interest in what was happening on the streets of Paris in 1848, where an uprising had resulted in the abdication of the king and the establishment of the Second Republic. Palgrave, accompanied by Benjamin Jowett, the head of Balliol College, Oxford, crossed the Channel to witness events first-hand. He was not just a spectator, but joined the Republican troops, marching with “a long stream of bayonets” amid shouts of “Vive la République”.
Returning to England, he joined the staff of Kneller Hall, a training college where working-class young men were educated at the state’s expense, then went off to gruelling teaching positions in workhouses and prison schools.
To know of his later life alters one’s view of The Golden Treasury, which becomes not just a literary event but a sociological experiment. That insight is typical of Bucknell’s book, which owes much of its appeal to extra-literary happenings.
The young American poet Ezra Pound, for example, wanted to replace The Golden Treasury with a massive 12-volume collection of the “best” poetry from across the world. The idea of including Japanese poems alongside English ones caused a tremendous hoo-ha, as if, Pound said, he “had killed a cat in the sacristy”, and his proposal was turned down.
The truth was, Bucknell points out, that Macmillan, which published The Golden Treasury, would have been ruined if Pound’s plan had gone ahead. As it was, The Golden Treasury flourished. By the Second World War it had sold more than half a million copies, and it became a model for the heavyweight collections that followed it such as WB Yeats’s Oxford Book of English Verse and Philip Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Verse. In Larkin’s selection, poems by Thomas Hardy outnumbered those by TS Eliot — a deliberate snub and a proclamation of the criteria of the “Movement poets”, to rescue poetry from Eliot and make it intelligible to the ordinary reader.
● Graeme Richardson on this year’s TS Eliot poetry prize: when did poets get so cosy?
It is typical of the versatility of Bucknell’s book that each of the last two chapters breaks new ground. The first, titled Pop, describes the sudden change in attitudes to poetry in the 1960s. Poetry was no longer something written by dead people. Live readings by poets, in front of an audience, often accompanied by jazz musicians, were in vogue, and you could watch poetry performances on TV.
In 1967 three poets from Liverpool, Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten, achieved mainstream success in the bestselling anthologies The Liverpool Scene and The Mersey Sound. The same year Corgi Books released a collection called Love, Love, Love, a lyric from the Beatles’ new hit, All You Need Is Love.
The emphasis of pop culture was on youth. “Will you still love me when I’m 64?” the Beatles sang, which made the idea of being 64 shocking and laughable. Henri’s poetry builds up a world that excludes anyone even remotely close to middle age. “Don’t worry,” he tells his teenage girlfriend in one poem. “There’ll be voluntary euthanasia for everyone over 30.”
That is precisely the kind of “worry” that the contents of Bucknell’s final chapter, titled Therapy, are designed to allay. One of the earliest poetry-as-therapy books was The Poetry Cure: A Pocket Medicine Chest of Verse (1925), edited by the poet Robert Schauffler. It contained “remedies” for readers who were feeling old or just sorry for themselves.
As Bucknell points out, this was essentially an extension of the Greek notion of the “katharsis” or purgation of emotions experienced by spectators at Greek tragedies. Another anthologist, Daisy Goodwin, titles her 2000 anthology 101 Poems to Get You Through the Day (and Night), and encourages readers to throw away the painkillers and cigarettes, and “use poems as crutches instead”.
It is not too much to say that Bucknell’s book enhances its subject at every turn, and promises well for her future as a critic.
The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture by Clare Bucknell
Head of Zeus £27.99 pp352
Source link
