The great English publishing house had its heyday in the middle part of the last century. These redoubts of high culture and male power - they were almost all run by monstrous men with the support of long-suffering women - had their headquarters in garrets at the tops of tall houses in Soho or Bloomsbury or Russell Square. They smelled of mildewed paper, tea, and strong drink: the grander members of their editorial staff tended to do their work, such as it was, in the morning, and get mildly drunk at lunchtime. The greatest of the "great houses" was, without doubt, Faber & Faber. It published fine fiction, and had a particular interest in Irish novelists, among them James Joyce, John McGahern, Vincent Lawrence and Thomas Kilroy; it also brought out Beckett's theatrical scripts. But Faber's real glory was its poetry list, a greater part of which had been assembled by Old Possum himself, T.S. Eliot, who had gone from slaving as a bank clerk to being a director of the firm. Like all the English houses, Faber has had some rocky times - rumour was that for a recent year or two the business had to lean heavily for support on royalties from Cats, the musical version of Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats - but lately it has come back to strength, with a strong new fiction department under Jonathan Riley. And the poetry list continues to be the envy of all in the trade, a treasure held in trust for English-speaking readers all over the world.
For all his right-wing views and High Church posturings, Eliot firmly believed that poetry is central to the spiritual health not only of a privileged few but of the populace at large. Faber has continued to cleave to that view. Its poetry volumes are always well made, handsome in design without being showy, serious without being imposing, and reasonably priced. A fine example of Faber style is its recent series of high-quality paperback volumes of verse selections that includes Yeats chosen by Seamus Heaney, Ezra Pound by Thom Gunn, Keats by Andrew Motion, and, perhaps most poignantly, Sylvia Plath by Ted Hughes. The majority of the volumes come with introductions by the selectors, varying from Andrew Motion's brief but eloquent defence of Keats as "a man of the world . . . who was in love with the world of the imagination", through John Fuller's celebration of the variousness of Auden, to Heaney's subtle reflections on Yeats the "public, smiling man" who took upon himself the role of national poet yet clung fiercely to his private obsessions.
"We certainly do not encounter in such work," Heaney writes of Yeats's oeuvre, "any image of life's surfaces as we know them in our world of consumer capitalism; but its sufficiency and recalcitrance encourage us to be more resolutely and abundantly alive, whatever the conditions." These volumes constitute a feast of poetry, filled with pleasures and surprises - especially surprises. For example, Thom Gunn is revelatory on Ezra Pound, a poet whose stock is particularly low at the moment. Writing of the fragmentary structure of the Cantos, Gunn points out that although we are unaccustomed to verse assembled in this way, "it is important, as with any poetry to which we are new, to read with an unreasonable trust, giving ourselves to it in the act of reading aloud . . . We understand what we can, pursuing the gist as we recreate the sound."
This is wise and timely advice, surrounded as we are these days with so much noise that we can hardly hear any more the music of our own thoughts. And "unreasonable trust" is really the only state in which to approach the work of any poet.
The other volumes in the set are War Music, Christopher Logue's magnificently quirky, free versions of parts of The Iliad; 20th-Century Scottish Poems selected by Douglas Dunn; Eliot's Four Quartets, something of an odd-man-out; Shakespeare selections by Ted Hughes; and Hughes himself selected by Simon Armitage. These are colourful, sturdy, pocket-sized books, with good paper, clear type-faces and, that rarest of things these days, stitched bindings: the printer is Italian, and it shows. They are extraordinarily good value at £4.99 each (in UK). Perhaps the Great Age hasn't entirely passed, after all.
John Banville is Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times