Flowers of Drivel

There’s something touchingly horticultural about the history of anthologies, scattered as it is with talk of “gatherings of flowers,” as Clare Bucknell points out in The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture (Head of Zeus, 2023). An anthologizing instinct stretches back to the Greeks, with their anthologia, via medieval European scholars with their florilegia, Latin for “gatherings of flowers,” but what is it that the poetry lover is after when looking to compile, or reach for, an anthology? These two impulses—the anthologist’s curation and its ensuing reception—are more interrelated than they might at first appear, with the practice of scrapbooking and commonplacing at the heart of historical anthology-making. Endless hours of poring over and copying favorite poems, passages, even single lines of verse by hand once characterized the DIY version of the anthology, long before the more formal, printed, and often lucrative exemplars that come to mind today.  

Broadly speaking, there are two types of anthologies, or at least two chief approaches to their compilation: the representative and the personal. Bucknell’s book is rich in precedents for both schools and laced with some devilishly entertaining—not to mention occasionally pompous—thoughts from both camps. In one of the earliest printed national anthologies, The British Muse (1738), William Oldys, the bibliographer behind the venture, made the case for the anthologist’s role as being primarily one of public service.

Anthologists, he argued, require a certain impartiality and far-sightedness: they must be some combination of museum curator and a gambler on futures, “a person, void of all prejudice … who had not only intelligence to know what compositions of value our country had produced, but leisure, patience and attention to go through a vast diversity of reading.” That leisure points, at least retrospectively, to a certain degree of—unavoidably—gentlemanly editorializing, but Oldys’s view touches on the sense of poetry, or the presentation of it, as helping to form a kind of national consciousness, to play an active role in shaping a country’s self-image in a way that was novel at the time. This was national history founded less on the dates of battles or the stirring of flags than on chest-swelling literary achievement.

The idea of a dispassionate approach to compiling anthologies has always had its skeptics. In A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928), Robert Graves and Laura Riding dished out an acidic satire about the rise of commercially successful (if artistically less so) gatherings during the “age of Anthologies,” as the publisher Collins christened the 1920s. Riding and Graves included a little reductio ad absurdum about the apparently unbiased editors behind the boom: “The ideal anthologist is a priest of Poetry to the people. … He must, in fact, to be free from prejudice, actually dislike poetry. He must be merely a barometer of fashion.”

The notion that anthologists can be free from prejudice is, ultimately, a nonstarter. Whatever their intentions to be clear-sightedly representative or to embody that untainted conduit/priest figure of Oldys’s figuration, all manner of aesthetic preference, commercial imperative, and personal animus must be factored in, and that’s before one gets to the more prosaic matter of copyright permissions and reprint fees. Bucknell notes that Philip Larkin, in a somewhat Graves and Riding-esque spirit, argued against his own role as selector for The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973): “At first I thought I would let the century choose the poets while I chose the poems”—a sort of “leave the labor of selection up to posterity” approach which, as he quickly discovered, had its limitations, at least when it came to meeting print deadlines.

Leaving the idea of the “representative” approach to one side for a moment, what then of the “personal” anthology? Behind this endeavor often lies an editor’s attempt to make a mark on literary culture, either individually or from a position at the forefront of some new “movement,” “school,” or “ism.” These editors argue for, or introduce, a new group of hitherto relatively sidelined poets or make a persuasive case about the common ground their chosen contributors share. The anthology can highlight this new bunch as being revolutionary, revivifying, or in some other vital way possessing the talent and impetus needed to sweep away an old, staid guard, often represented by a previous anthology of a similar nature.

Usually by the time the squad photograph is taken, the team in question, often loosely grouped and snarlingly disputed to start with, has broken up, often permanently, or at least most of its members have moved on to other ways of writing or of making a living. There are countless examples even in the (relatively) recent past and speaking only of the UK and US. They include influential anthologies such as Al Alvarez’s The New Poetry, whose title, if not its contents, echoed another anthology, Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry; Naked Poetry, edited by Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey; Conductors of Chaos, edited by Iain Sinclair; Modern Women Poets, edited by Deryn Rees-Jones; and The BreakBeat Poets, edited by Kevin Coval, Nate Marshall, and Quraysh Ali Lansana, to pick only a small and hardly representative bouquet.

Anthologists such as Alvarez—who spent his introduction largely railing against the “gentility” that had, to his mind, corrupted and arrested modernism in the UK—take up their task in the spirit of an evangelist or, at times, a prophet. Their aim, however forlorn, is to startle a reaction out of readers, which might in turn create change, especially if those readers happen to be other poets—and, in Alvarez’s case, poets beset by too much gentility.

The problem with an anthologist’s leading their charge with some sort of manifesto—whether aesthetic, in Alvarez’s case, or political, as in the anthologies of the 1930s, where the imperative to “take sides” in the fight against fascism became an urgent matter superseding any urge toward ironic detachment—is one of preaching to the converted. As Bucknell notes when discussing Nancy Cunard’s radical anthology Negro (1934), “the kinds of people most likely to read her work were middle-class, progressive men and women like her … since they had chosen to pick up her book [they] needed little convincing of the importance of the political issues at stake.” If the risk of publishing into an echo chamber is abiding, anthologies themselves have, nonetheless, proved a democratizing means of disseminating and—dare one say it—popularizing poetry.

The cheaply printed, portable, and “improving” anthology of poetry was a successful means of bringing poetry to “the masses” once literacy grew in the early 20th century. Bucknell writes of the sheer quantities of poetry anthologies soldiers took to the front during World War I, noting that Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse (1900) “presided over the Great War,” thanks in large part to its handily representing “many books in one.” Despite being a bulky 1,000-page tome, it embodied what was then the English canon.

Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1861) was another comprehensive(ish) survey that served a similar role for soldiers, ensuring that they had—amid the deprivations and horrors—ready access to Milton, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth. As the war dragged on, the hugely popular Georgian Poetry anthologies, edited by the polymath and civil servant Edward Marsh, began to be a regular feature in the kitbag. These five volumes, published between 1912 and 1922, included among their poets Rupert Brooke, whose patriotic work summed up the spirit in which many British soldiers had signed up if not their experiences once they got there.

The same broadening impulse informed earlier anthologies too. The economic reality that meant books once had been prohibitively expensive began to collapse around the ending of perpetual copyright laws in 1774, and a whole new industry of “Beauties” sprang up. They were selections of highlights from the oeuvres out-of-copyright authors vetted for their morality and sold in enormous numbers. The first one plundered Samuel Johnson’s works.  

These “Beauties” were—essentially—made up of palatable, chaste, and somewhat low-tar extracts of the classics of literature, with all the potentially rude, profane, or even mildly borderline sauce removed for the genteel readers imagined as their putative audience. Likened to “letting the mob in to vote” by some of the more elitist stewards of the literary world, the effect was to significantly widen the possible readership for poetry, an early precursor of Quiller-Couch's thin-leafed Oxford.

All of this helped shape the sense of the “representative” anthology, its role as something like a précis of the—often patriotic or at least nationally ennobling—literature produced in the language, a kind of public museum for verse. This, too, had its critics, the sense of a “leveling” of the work contained therein, a false equivalence or flattening out, much of it with the whiff of classism. Riding and Graves made a further attack in this regard in their Pamphlet Against Anthologies:

Poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley, Keats, become affected by the same negative poison, to a point where they are almost unrecognizable; so faces in the Underground or Overhead railways are made negative, as faces, by the spell of the cheap ticket which is the only link between them.

But how “representative” are anthologies that attempt to be so? A comparatively recent eruption in US letters points to some of the underlying difficulties of assembling anything claiming to be universal, or survey-like, in a world of such diverse, fractured, and often oppositional aesthetics and poetics. Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry (2011) was—as is so often the case with any apparently “representative” anthology—greeted with a wave of criticism about the poets who weren’t in it rather than any lingering focus on those who were. There was no Plath or Ginsberg, for example—although this may have been due to that most mundane editorial hindrance: the rights department—and critics including Helen Vendler felt that the book was looking to “shift the balance” when it came to telling the story of the previous century in American poetry, a charge that Dove saw as “a last stand against the hordes of up-and-coming poets of different skin complexions” on the part of a reactionary “establishment.”

Notably, Vendler’s criticism, published in the New York Review of Books, was in part founded on the sheer volume of poets deemed fit for inclusion and, once again, deployed the language of the gardener:  

No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading, so why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value? Anthologists may now be extending a too general welcome. Selectivity has been condemned as “elitism,” and a hundred flowers are invited to bloom.

If it seems more or less impossible for a prospective editor today to attempt a canon-setting, universally-agreed-upon approach, a Vendlerian “selectivity” if you will, it’s worth considering that even a book such as Palgrave’s Golden Treasury—that touchstone of high-minded taste and nation-shaping Victorian certainty—was itself more limited and exclusionary than its legend suggests. Only poems that struck an appropriately “lyric” note, as judged by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and an elite panel of advisors, were allowed. Nothing argumentative or rhetorical was welcome, and William Blake, for one, was persona non grata. Likewise, both Larkin and his predecessor, W.B. Yeats, brought their various intolerances and predilections to their apparently definitive renditions of the Oxford Book of English Verse.

In an increasingly atomized landscape, one approach to the poetry anthology that has endured is the unavoidably precious “Beauties” angle. Here, poetry is sold as a remedy or as generally therapeutic in some way. The original “Beauties” were designed to remove anything that might cause young ladies to blush or patricians to feel alarmed about what their servants might be getting up to; the new guiding principle is an admixture of self-help and self-care, a kind of pick-me-up in stanzas. Bucknell demonstrates that this poetry-as-medicine is hardly a new invention, with the earliest iteration being The Poetry Cure: A Pocket Medicine Chest of Verse (1925), edited by the cellist and biographer Robert Haven Schauffler. There is, it’s worth flagging, a difference between the use of poetry in therapy or for therapeutic purposes, such as its deployment in a clinical setting by some psychiatrists in New York since the 1960s, and poetry being sold as therapy.

A financial element is not a new factor in compiling and packaging poetry anthologies, but in the realm of the modern poetry-as-cure genre, it’s steeped in the language and sophistications of advertising. Scares about poetry’s being sold downriver are, similarly, full of historical precedent. As Bucknell points out in her discussion of the Mersey Sound anthologies, collections of the so-called “Pop Poets” whose quirky, comic, and often surreal poems were full of pop culture references and an immersion in the youth culture of the 1960s, the marketing was founded on the similarity between this bunch of new poets from Liverpool and the four-piece mop-topped Beatles with whom they shared a city and occasionally a venue. Part of the problem for some was that there was “marketing” going on at all, as Bucknell writes:

If established poets turned their noses up at the idea of forming instant, emotive connections with the people who consumed their work, how could they compete with other entertainment forms—pop concerts, cinema, television—which … thrived by knowing how to give audiences exactly what they wanted?

One answer was and remains: who said anyone wanted to compete? August Kleinzahler, writing about Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems (2002), an anthology born from the “poetry is good for you” sentiment, as well as Keillor’s radio show, in which he read motivating verse to his listeners, was quick to debunk some of the language that gathered around the serving up of chummily palatable verse as a means of spiritual uplift:

Ninety percent of adult Americans can pass through this life tolerably well, if not content, eating, defecating, copulating, shopping, working, catching the latest Disney blockbuster, without having a poem read to them by Garrison Keillor or anyone else. …Multivitamins are good for you. Exercise, fresh air, and sex are good for you. Fruit and vegetables are good for you. Poetry is not. 

This aspect most brings to mind the “Beauties” approach in that these poetry-as-medicine anthologies are founded on a sense that by reading them one might hope to perform an act of “self-care” and that they focus on easy-to-digest, syntactically unchallenging poems—those written by “a middle-aged creative writing instructor catching a whiff of mortality in the countryside,” in Kleinzahler’s phrase. The endeavor is, in that regard, not a little patronizing, as Andrew O’Hagan pointed out in a London Review of Books essay on the same phenomenon, in 2004:

Poetry is often difficult, and its difficulty is part of the richness of what we have; it is a crime to make the unobvious obvious, an act of vandalism to render it trite, like turning Mozart into ringtones while calling attention to its improving qualities. Some people, of course, will call that democracy, but what does it leave you with? An increased audience for Mozart? A bigger sale for new volumes of poetry? No, I’m afraid not.

O’Hagan also points out, as does Kleinzahler, that it often isn’t the poems’ fault and that much of the work contained in these anthologies is fine and even enduring on its own terms: “These books are full of excellent poems which suffer only by being corralled together under a nauseating rubric.”

But then the “establishment” would say that, wouldn’t it. The anthologists and marketeers, among others, will always be at pains to point that out. It’s not for the “elitists”—it’s all being done in the name of democracy or boundary-breaking, and this justification too has a long-standing precedent. As Bucknell writes of The Mersey Sound, there is in the presentation of all manner of other thematic, “improving” anthologies a kind of baked-in defiance “that these books were so obviously and unapologetically not meant for the literary establishment.” It’s harder, in the internet age, to make a case for their having any democratizing qualities over their more patently market-led aspects, given that most of the fruits (or flowers) of the world’s literary endeavor are now available at the click of a few buttons. The future of the anthology may, in fact, be another case of rolling back the years. Bucknell, writing on historical readers’ approach to making commonplace books, describes their methods:

What early modern readers chose to read, and how they read it, therefore, was both systematic and serendipitous. On one hand, they approached books as tools for making sense of the world, mining them for information, advice or anecdotes which might have some bearing on a personal situation. But they also read in a manner that we might think of as illogical or random. Rather than absorbing themselves in the forward movement of a poem or prose text, they read non-sequentially, “in fits and starts,” plucking out passages as they went, and hopping around and between books as their patterns of interest or emotional needs dictated.

It all sounds a lot like reading online. If access is no longer the barrier it once was, what is the role of the anthologist now? The “personal” approach may still be possible, with irrepressible Alvarez-like force of personality or aesthetic argument, but the “representative” is—literally—a much harder sell in an age where we can all be our own gardeners, however much we may or may not know about the various flowers on offer. As Bucknell notes, “Social media is its own kind of half-public, half-private anthology,” and, naturally, it’s already become possible for would-be Palgraves to get their own selections printed up in fancy (and paid-for) covers, if they wish. So, perhaps we’re finally free from elitism and oppressive canon-imposition, and in place of the “priest of Poetry” or the biased public servants, there is now a raft of data-driven algorithms to lead us, through a mix of serendipity and system, to discover, catalog, and clutch to our bosoms poems that speak to our higher nature. It’s not like there’s any potential for bias—or conflict of interest—there, right?