`It is a book of poems, not of poets", says editor Michael Schmidt of this timely Harvill anthology (a word from Greek, meaning bunch of flowers). Since Schmidt calls himself "a particularist", best to begin by savouring individual poems, taking John Ashbery's advice in What is Poetry:
Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.
Now open them on a thin vertical path.
It might give us . . . what? . . . some flowers soon?
Here you'll find Eliot's Prufrock, who hasn't heard "the mermaids singing, each to each". Here - on which "so much depends" - is the extraordinary ordinary red wheelbarrow of Williams, "glazed with rain/water/beside the white chickens". And here, too, is Yeats's golden bird, still singing of "what is past, or passing, or to come".
Elizabeth Bishop's mastered "art of losing" is also here, along with Larkin's laconic, elegiac high windows, Berryman's panicky dream songs, Mahon's disused shed, Heaney's seed cutters out of Breughel, "With all of us there, our anonymities".
And here are Iain Crichton Smith's lovely, ramifying Deer On the High Hills, "with great bounding leaps like the mind of God". And (although under-represented) Ted Hughes is here, "alive in the river of light/Among the creatures of light . . ." In addition, there are plenty of lovely surprises (for me, at least) from the likes of Mina Loy, C.H.Sisson, Michael Palmer, Gwyneth Lewis, and others.
In all of these we find the work and play of language that is poetry - the hungry, interrogative, celebratory, sad, instinctive, knowing ways it takes in the moment-by-moment emergencies of the world, giving us back the world made word, mapped for our understanding, spoken into shapes of consolation or judgment or discovery or joy.
And even if each poem here doesn't "add to the resources of the medium and make it new", as Schmidt claims in his well-wrought introduction, each is an honest attempt to bring the world into words, to register not only the outer world that's available to our senses, but the interior universe of consciousness itself as it interacts with what is "out there", "rippling (as Jorie Graham says) over the accumulations, the slowed-down drifting permanences".
(Having mentioned the introduction, I should add that Schmidt's historical riff on Modernist revolutionaries like T.E. Hulme, H.D., the Imagists, Eliot and Pound, is - in spite of its inflated estimation of Laura Riding and the absence of any mention of Gertrude Stein - a marvel of compressed insight and information, while his articulate enthusiasm for and understanding of free verse should put a definitive spike in the pop-guns of doctrinaire "neo-formalists".)
As well as being a bunch of flowers, of course, an anthology is also an extended act of judgment. One way or another, canonisation is the name of the game, especially under a banner that says Twentieth-Century Poetry in English - poets, that is, as well as poems. It's always a question of - as King Lear says in a different context - "who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out", shifting us from the pastoral landscape of literary appreciation to the battlefield of literary politics.
OF the hundred and eighteen poets included here, around fifty are English, around forty are American. Of the various others, eight are Irish: Yeats, Kavanagh, MacNeice, Kinsella, Heaney, Mahon, Boland and Muldoon. About twenty-five of the poets are women. (My approximate numbers are due to the fact that, for some misguided reason, the editor has included neither a biographical nor a bibliographical note on each poet.) Another statistic, the distribution of page-rations per poet, is a key to the editor's taste and empowered opinion: the best get most. Accordingly, Michael Schmidt's Top Twenty bards of the century are Eliot (16 pages), Hardy (14), Pound, Yeats, Auden, Ashbery, Les Murray (11), Lowell (10), Graves, Davie, Sisson, Olson (9) Bishop, Larkin, Kinsella, Riding, Doty, Boland, Ginsberg, Judith Wright (8). If one is surprised by the "who's in, who's out" of such a list (as well as by the general proportion of English poets to American and others), it only underlines the relativism of the whole anthology enterprise, which also must come to mind when considering not only country of origin, but publisher of origin. That over forty of the poets included here are published by Carcanet Press, whose editorial director is Michael Schmidt, was probably a factor in the canonisation process. Presumably the Faber (or Bloodaxe or Penguin or Gallery or Norton or Ecco) Book of Twentieth Century Verse would (will?) look different from the Harvill tome, both in inclusions and exclusions and in the relative allotments of space.
Among the poets Schmidt hasn't included who would seem to me indispensable in any anthology of twentieth-century poetry in English are Clarke, Montague, Murphy, Longley and Ni Chuilleanain from the Irish side of things; and Kinnell, Levertov, Snyder, Hass, Simic, Charles Wright and Anne Carson from North America. And if an American, Australian, Canadian, South African, Indian or New Zealand editor were asked, the list of the selected would have to be adjusted accordingly. And adjusted again if a woman were the selector. As for the poems of those who have been included, I'd find it impossible to ignore a number which don't appear here - among them Keeping Going (Heaney), The Season of Phantasmal Peace (Walcott), The Whitsun Weddings (Larkin), At the Fish Houses (Bishop), Incantada (Muldoon), and something from Kavanagh's The Great Hunger, all of them stronger than a number of the poems chosen by Schmidt to represent these poets at their best. To return to the particular texts gathered here: what spoors of our ending century do they provide? While for the most part not as directly politically engaged as the 20th century poetries of Eastern Europe or South America - being less, that is, a poetry of witness than one of what I'd call "wakefulness" - the poems still carry the marks of war and peace, private and public life, local landscape, love and sex and death - what Beckett refers to as "births, graves, and varieties of motion". (Less of Eros, I must say, than one might expect). Among those marks, I'd note two in particular, one to do with style, the other with subject matter.
Poetry in English in this century demonstrates a dynamic marriage between the cadences of common speech and a commitment to what one might call oratorical panache. Such a union is a defining characteristic of Modernism, originating in the rapid fluctuations of register in Pound and Eliot. Yeats gives it a powerful performative twist (swinging between Byzantium and Crazy Jane), Auden is its witty master, while Bishop, Larkin and Lowell in their different ways are all practitioners of this fertile double tongue. Closer to home it's a prime resource of Kavanagh's imagination, a legacy inherited by Heaney, Mahon, and many others. Modern poetry's language, that is, mixes the grand with the demotic in mutually enriching ways.
WHAT might be behind such a persistent feature of twentieth-century verse? On the negative side, I suppose, it's a deliberate casting off of nineteenth-century rhetorical shackles ("No more Tennysonianisms", says Pound). But on the positive side it represents a collective commitment on the part of the poets to a vision of the ordinary world itself as art's proper sphere, a site of faithful registration first, and then of celebration tinged with ceremony. . Wherever it comes from, it makes for poems which surprise and delight by their sheer attachment to the phenomenal world, by the quality of their attention to it, and by a language that accommodates a variously textured sense of that world and what it means. Stylistic considerations like these mirror one of the most important features of twentieth-century poetry: the persistent sense (clear in so many of the poems gathered here) of a debate, implicit or explicit, between the sacred - maybe the "sacramental" - and the secular sense of things. A dominant theme of twentieth-century verse is the loss of faith itself, in one guise or another.
Many of the poets represented here engage in this act of wakeful interrogation of loss and of what is left--from Wallace Stevens, whose "casual flocks of pigeons make/Ambiguous undulations as they sink/Downward to darkness on extended wings", to Geoffrey Hill's prayerful searching out of "the cold paradox of fire", to Gwyneth Lewis's Walking with God: "hungry for wonder, thirsting for fear". In some such way, strong poets become the antennae of the race, sensing and trying to map with language the spiritual texture of the world at large. Mostly what they strike is the note of loss itself, marvellously compounded by the sense of a human energy to affirm, in spite of such loss, some spiritual presence in the world.
Good poets are the explorers of the world. Out on the frontiers, they send back bulletins. Read by only a small minority, seeming much of the time not to matter, the art they practise is nonetheless central to any culture's sense of itself, to any sense, finally, of belonging in the world. An anthology like this, whatever its relative merits (and limits), reminds us richly and variously of this encouraging fact. We know the world better for such poems, such poets. Eamon Grennan is a poet, teacher and critic. His Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century is forthcoming in the US
