Summer and Winters

I’m going to be away for a couple of weeks as of tomorrow (Sunday), which sadly coincides with the publication and launch party of Magma 53, in which a poem of mine appears. This number has been edited by Kona McPhee and Rob Mackenzie, who blogs at Surroundings; they picked a short poem, almost an epigram, I wrote at least three years ago, called “Vagrants”. I was slightly surprised, because it was the oldest poem in my submission, and one naturally takes more interest (and pride!) in more recent work. But it’s characteristic of mine in several ways. Firstly, it’s a formal poem, being in the same mould as William Empson’s “Let it Go” – basically the sestet lopped off an Italian sonnet. Secondly, the crux of the poem hinges on the etymological play I make with the title – something I’ve probably overdone to the point of its becoming a gimmick. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it’s a Wintersian poem.

Yvor Winters, like Empson in this respect if in few others, was sort of a fringe member of the New Critics, although he was hostile to many of their principles and methods, despite personal friendships. I never read his critical work (of which the most important volumes are In Defence of Reason and Forms of Discovery) until my final year as an undergraduate, but I had already received his impress vicariously through two of his English friends and admirers, Thom Gunn and Donald Davie. (Gunn studied on Winters’ creative writing course at the University of Stanford, which Davie took over on Winters’ retirement.) Reacting against the Modernism of Pound and Williams to which he’d subscribed as a young man, Winters demanded that poems make definitive moral statements about their subjects, and embody in their traditional forms and plain diction the rational awareness of a sane adult. One hardly needs a critical smartbomb to knock holes in that: his agenda is often exclusionary and dogmatic. And though he vociferated against what he saw as the faux-naivety of modernism (he argued that Hart Crane’s language was a confidence trick just like the alchemical jargon of Face and Subtle in The Alchemist), some of his own avowed critical preferences seem even more willed, while some of his pronouncements about reason and morality made him sound like a dangerously genuine naïf.

Still, Winters was a powerful critic and a rigorous sparing-partner: his influence is all over Gunn and Davie, but also on his other students like Robert Pinsky, John Peck and Robert Hass. Sean O’Brien has argued that he was also an influence on Michael Donaghy. I’ve often wanted to get beyond his field of force; but I feel a little like Empson said about T.S. Eliot: “I do not know for certain how much of my own mind he invented, let alone how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him. He is a very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike the east wind.”

***

On Friday morning, I left Glasgow, where I’ve been living since 2005. I’ll be back up periodically to see my friends and PhD supervisors (and eventually to do my viva); but this summer I’m moving back to England to live with my girlfriend. On Thursday night, after a day of frantic packing, then a pizza in the Botanic Gardens in the beautiful summer weather we’ve enjoyed this week, she and I heard the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra play Philip Glass’ Symphony No. 6, a setting of Allen Ginsberg’s “Plutonian Ode”. Glass himself was sat a few rows behind me in Glasgow’s City Halls. I don’t especially like Ginsberg beyond a few odd lines, and I wasn’t convinced by all of the musical setting, but there was also a beautiful Elgar piece, “Sospiri” and Strauss’ “Death and Transfiguration” in the first half. It was an appropriate event for our final evening in the city: my girlfriend and I first met two years ago when our mutual friends (who were also there this time) invited us to a concert at the same venue. I’m going to miss Glasgow, which has been my home for many years, especially since my family moved to Vancouver, terribly; but I’m excited about creating a new one, and sharing it with someone I love.

Wordsworth's Hands

I’ve recently been marking first-year undergraduate exam papers, for which one text in the close reading section was William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring”. It’s often frustrating to see students focussing on the wrong aspects of the poem, or just not focussing at all; but as I read their responses to the poem, one feature of it began to attract my attention.

Most of the students at least had the wit to notice that Wordsworth repeats the line, “What man has made of man”. No doubt because of the pastoral mode of the poem, most of the students argued that the tragedy of “what man has made of man” was due to industrialisation, and the pollution of the natural world. This is fair enough; but the poem never makes this explicit. The poem was published in the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1798), so the Industrial Revolution was well under way – but the French one had also turned into the Reign of Terror, prompting Wordsworth and Coleridge to turn away from their earlier political radicalism. It might be just as easily argued that Wordsworth is alluding, from the pleasant retirement of the English countryside, to the horrors of the French metropolis.

But there’s something about that reiterated line that makes me favour the prevailing interpretation (although no student made this argument). Its main lexical components are the verb “make”, and the noun “man”, repeated – a repetition within a repetition. So the line is about making things. Now, in my fairly crude (but hopefully, at least for this purpose, serviceable) understanding of the Industrial Revolution, the development of mechanical production techniques made traditional manual skills obsolete, and drew huge workforces to the industrial cities (further damaging older, rural communities) to work in the factories – or, to give them their unabbreviated name, manufactories, which word derives from the Latin manus, “hand”, and facere, “to make”; that is, where something is made by hand. But it was precisely this element of being hand-made (the “man” in “manual”) that was being displaced by mechanisation, which introduced the capacity to produce identical goods repeatedly. The OED contains references to both “manufactory” and “factory”, in the sense of somewhere things are made, from the 17^th century; in fact, the latter (from 1618) predates the former (1641) by two decades. The hand did not drop off the stem with the invention of the steam engine. But if one looks at the compound formations, one finds an explosion of “factory” compounds dating from the early 19^th century, all with a sorrowful citation:

•      Factory boy (1833) “He is perhaps a better judge of fat cattle… than of lean Factory boys and girls.” (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine)
•    Factory child (1832) “Education of factory children in England far behind Scotland. (Parliamentary Papers)
• ·     Factory chimney (1848) “She… looked towards the factory-chimneys, and the cloud of smoke which hovers over Manchester.” (E.C. Gaskell, Mary Barton)

There are more, including the optimistic-sounding “Factory bill” (“But since this Factory Bill has been agitated… the children have gathered round me… and have said… ‘Will you get the Ten Hour Bill?’ Parliamentary Papers, 1832), and later, ‘factory-inspector’, from 1847: “The appointment of Factory Inspectors has been productive of the greatest advantage” (J.R. McCulloch, A descriptive and statistical account of the British Empire). There is also ‘factory owner’, with a more recent citation from 1934: “That no factory-owner shall sit as a magistrate in cases concerning the spinning of cotton.” That comes from Ezra Pound, Canto XXXIII. Pound’s Cantos are often openly didactic about the good governance of industry and commerce; but in Wordsworth’s poem, the reiteration of “man”, with its etymological pun upon manus, stands as an ironic marker of “what man has made of man” – not just what he has made men (not to mention women and girls, like the factory child who “must be at her work… at four o'clock of a snowy winter-morning” – Parliamentary Papers) into, but what he has made from them, that is, through the exploitation of their labour.

One student I marked argued that, although Wordsworth rhymes ABAB throughout the rest of the poem, the first stanza only has B rhymes. This just shows that s/he didn’t realise that, for the purposes of a poem, “notes” may rhyme with “thoughts”; but they did well to look for some significance to this, claiming that this shows a discord within nature despite the harmony Wordsworth presents elsewhere. A good shot; but I would argue instead that, given the “blended notes” are of nature (birdsong) and the “pleasant thoughts” are human (the poet’s), the real discord is between the poet and nature, despite what he says about how Nature (capital N!) linked “The human soul that through me ran” to “her fair works”. Moreover, if the words are taken as rhymes, and rhyme is always a method of joining words semantically (to contrast or complement), then the imperfect conjunction of the natural sounds (the words considered as pure sound, like birds’ “notes”) and their semantic burdens (what “thoughts” they convey) actually just shows up what is true of all language: that the word is not the thing (pace Pound, nomina NON sunt consequentia rerum!); that language and the capacity for conceptualisation it gives humans is what separates them – albeit not absolutely – from nature. Language is the medium of human culture and communication; thus, in a different sense, “what man has made of man” is a result of this necessary interaction.

But recognition of this forces one to rethink one’s political stance with regard to the poem and its contexts. It is easy to oppose inhuman working conditions, misgovernment, and tyranny (whether of the loom or the guillotine). Those contingent evils, however, must be seen in terms of a more fundamental problem. The students I marked apparently thought that the Industrial Revolution had disturbed a dynamic whereby humankind had been in harmony with nature. That isn’t so; and even without going into post-Saussurian theory, Raymond Williams forcefully makes the case (in The Country and the City) that, in the search for the golden age of harmony with nature, one finds oneself in an infinite regress. The question, then, as it seems to me, is what attitude one takes towards social amelioration in light of this. Does one expect all social ills to disappear with the abolition of economic exploitation? Does one take the cynical view that, since humans have a bad lot anyway, they might as well suffer their servitude? Or might one take the more modest one, with the reservations beautifully expressed by William Empson (in Some Versions of Pastoral) apropos Gray’s Elegy, and aim for improvement without therefore believing in “progress”?

Intimate Exposure

I only contributed one piece to the short-lived Glasgow Review of Books, but I may as well repost it here for the sake of posterity...

Intimate Exposure

Henry King reviews Intimate Exposure: Essays on the Public-Private divide in British Poetry since 1950, ed. by Merriman and Grafe (London: McFarland & Co, 2010)

If you overlooked the subtitle of this collection of essays, and saw only its title and, below it, the cover image of an eye pressed against a keyhole, you might think for a moment that you’d strayed into a more risqué section of the bookshop. But the contributors to Intimate Exposure are less concerned with titillating the reader than with how poetry interacts with discursive formations of the private and public – which does include, perhaps sadly, the “public prurience about the Hughes-Plath myth” (p.4) which helped sell Birthday Letters, “the media’s interest in Carol Anne Duffy’s sexuality” (p.2) and “the crisis […] over the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry” in 2009 (p.2). The essayists form an interesting mix of British and American, but also French and German academics, bringing a diversity of perspectives to the British subject-matter, which bodes well for seeing through the common assumptions that are more likely to blind people talking about their own culture.

However, a quick look at the contents pages brings a surprise. Of the five sections into which the essays are divided, the middle one is given over to “Seamus Heaney and the Privateness of the Human Condition”. Surely the editors are aware of Heaney’s response to his inclusion in the 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry? Yes, they are, and admit in their introduction that this requires “a word of explanation” (p.6), citing his “Open Letter” to the editors of the Penguin anthology, and pointing out that in stating “my passport’s green” (p.6),

Heaney here implicitly declares himself Irish by referring to a document that is both personal and public (passports are the legal property of the issuing government).

One might go further and recall the next two lines: “No glass of ours was ever raised / To toast the queen.” It has recently been reported (in semi-private) that Heaney did indeed raise a glass to her Royal Highness on her trip to the Republic of Ireland. Is this a reflection of Heaney mellowing with age? (One can hardly say the situation in East Belfast has mellowed.) Or is it the tact of a smiling public man, knowing when not to cause a fuss? More productively for poetry, one might look again at the lines from “Open Letter”: who, and in what circumstances, is behind that possessive “ours”? Irish nationals, or nationalists? Or the poet’s family, Catholics living in Northern Ireland? One might plump for one reading or the other; the point is that a tiny, seemingly unimportant word bears a weight of meaning that can determine the political valence of the whole, and acts as a hinge or threshold between private and public worlds. Thankfully, this is the spirit of enquiry with which most of Intimate Exposure is carried out.

Although a whole section on the Colossus of Glanmore might suggest that only poets as famous as Seamus are visible to the American and European contributors, one of the heartening things about Intimate Exposure is that several of the poets discussed are relatively minor figures. Although Norton Anthology figures such as Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison and Geoffrey Hill loom customarily large in these pages, there are also discussions of Susan Wicks, Patience Agbabi, and Stephen Romer. Robert Archambeau’s essay, “Public Faces in Private Places: Messianic Privacy in Cambridge Poetry”, is in fact about questions of the fame, privacy, and public relevance of the poetry associated with the ‘Cambridge School’, whose leading light is J.H. Prynne.

Archambeau is apparently sceptical of the claims sometimes made for Cambridge School poetry, e.g. that Prynne’s work, according to David Shepard, can “recombine a language fragmented into technical jargons”, thus “return[ing] this knowledge to the public sphere from its sequestration in the ivory tower” (quoted by Archambeau, p.34), or that “Cambridge poetry “collide[s] with the powerful instrumental discourses of the culture” with the effect of “smashing them into pieces”” (p.36). These advocates of Cambridge School poetry appear to be making contradictory claims – does Prynne recombine fragmented discourses, or fragment totalizing discourses? – although this may simply be a problem arising from generalisations about a so-called ‘school’, whose members may or may not live in Cambridge or have attended that university. But the contradiction that structures Archambeau’s essay is simply that, given the self-imposed marginality of the poets and their work (often printing privately, not attempting to publish in mainstream magazines – even, as Archambeau notes of Prynne, refusing to when asked), their poetry is not in a position to affect politics practically. Furthermore, Archambeau points out that “[s]uch criticism comes, increasingly, from within the Cambridge School itself” (p.41). It is certainly difficult to see how a group famous for their own and their poetry’s obscurity can have any political impact. Archambeau has elsewhere (such as on his excellent blog, Samizdat) historicised this way of seeing the political influence of poetry as descending from Shelley’s Defence of Poetry by way of Ezra Pound – but as C.H. Sisson, a civil servant who became Under-Secretary for labour before achieving success as a poet, wrote in his study, The Spirit of British Administration,

[i]f to rule is to generate the ideas, the vulgarization of which turn the course of history, no doubt Shelley is in the right of it, and the rulers are not the men in Whitehall, or even men who badger Whitehall but people who stay at home writing surprising sentences or drawing unexpected lines on paper.

Ted Hughes was another colossus in his own lifetime and afterwards, to the point where one feels a little weary at the prospect of revisiting his poetry. Laurel Peacock, however, offers a sophisticated reading of Hughes as Poet Laureate, based on Derrida’s essay “La Bête et le souverain”, arguing for a post-human understanding of the laureateship as “constructed out of the raw materials of the nonhuman” (p.43) and granting its incumbent the right to exist “above to the laws of poetry” and morality (p.44) – at least while Ted Hughes held the post. The argument is an interesting one, but Peacock overlooks certain facts that would make this a more useful essay for considering the laureateship as an institution, rather than just the crowning glory of Hughes’ career. At one stage, discussing the mythic origin of the term in the story of Daphne and Apollo, Peacock points out that Petrarch, having called his beloved Laura,

alters the story to cast himself in the role of Daphne, pursued and threatened by Eros and by Laura, who are said to have “transformed me into what I am, making me of a living man a green laurel that loses no leaf for all the cold season.”” (p.48)

In Peacock’s posthuman reading, aware that fables are “a staging for the living […] for use by progressive humanist narratives” (p.49) “the strangely transformed prey of Apollo’s/ Petrarch’s pursuit, Laura/Daphne, morphs into pursuer, and the poet himself morphs into tree form”; thus “[h]e is transformed by this otherness, no longer human, at the very moment he makes a claim of immortality, central to humanism” (p.49). A further twist is added when one remembers that this comes from someone whose first name is Laurel: Daphne turns into a literary critic, pursuing her masculine phallogocentric laureate, and staging him within her own interpretation.

This is fascinating criticism of Hughes, but its inadequacy as a theorisation of laureateship per se is evident if one remembers that he only took up the post in 1984; for the previous twelve years, it was held by John Betjeman. It would be possible to make similar readings of Sir John’s poetry (“What strenuous singles we played after tea, / We in the tournament – you against me!”), but the comic discrepancy of talking about sovereign violence and posthumanism with regard to “A Subaltern’s Love-Song” suggests that a nuance is missing. Peacock states that “[t]he Poet Laureate is only sovereign in relation to the rules of poetry, crowned by the state and by critics as the one licenced to break rules and change them” (p.47), citing Seamus Heaney’s comment that “Hughes’s appointment breaks the mould” (p.47). But surely Heaney’s soundbite implies that laureates do not always defy convention, but the appointment of Hughes inaugurated a new form of laureateship – before which, they were expected to play by the conventional rules.

Daniella Janscó’s essay teases out the contrasts and confrontation between two Nobel laureates, Heaney and Joseph Brodsky, focussing on Heaney’s poem “The Birch Grove” from District and Circle (2006), teasing out the ambivalent details with which he frames a character who declares, “Trumping life / With a quote” from Brodsky’s Nobel lecture, that “If art teaches us anything […] it’s that the human condition is private.” Torsten Caeners also looks at poems from District and Circle, discussing Heaney’s “Poetry of Redress in a Post-9/11 World”. It’s refreshing to hear some serious discussion of his more recent work, although it doesn’t surpass the earlier; sadly, though, this highlights one of the problems with the book’s fourth section. Carole Birkan-Berz’s essay on “Poetic Form and National Consciousness in the Poetry of Tony Harrison and Geoffrey Hill” is especially dependent upon unsurprising readings of over-familiar texts, going back to Harrison’s “v.” and Hill’s “September Song”. It’s only to be expected that critics should write about the major poems of a period; but it should also be expected that they should bring something new to their analysis. The open-ended chronology of the collection (“…Since 1950”, presumably to the present) also imposes an expectation of discussing the work of poets still writing – such as Hill. Fortunately, editor Emily Taylor Merriman’s essay on Hill goes up to A Treatise of Civil Power, and makes trenchant observations about Hill’s work since The Triumph of Love. When many critics have written him off as a dusty old dictionary-pillager, Merriman deserves credit for stressing the importance to Hill’s rhetoric of his “male, rather British, raunchiness”, by which “he makes “the inappropriate singularly appropriate to his purposes” (p.196) – as those listening to his recent Oxford lectures will know from his lingering over the connotations of “the bay where all men ride” in Shakespeare’s sonnet 137. But when, having compared him to “an exhibitionistic flasher”, she states that “the perceived line of sexual aggression and sexual generosity, or between pain and pleasure, may depend on the cognitions of the recipient,” (p.96) Merriman apparently struggles to justify this mode of Hill’s writing, making this highly rhetorical form of exposure sound less intimate than indecent.

In the final essay in the collection, “The Public Intimacy of the Poetry of Sorrow”, Catherine Phillips, after discussing various traditional elegies such In Memoriam, ends with an analysis of how Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind 1997” “characterized many people’s response to Diana”, as “both “England’s golden child” and also someone who “burnt the candle” at both ends, living harder and faster and getting into common difficulties” (p.218). Nick Cave once sang, “I thought of my friends who had died of exposure, / And I remembered other ones who had died from the lack of it.” Although Intimate Exposure does not always bring greater definition to the more weathered faces in its array, its editors and contributors deserve credit for bringing a few others in from the cold, as well as adding to a field of debate that will continue to grow in scope and importance.

Quite tempted by these...

Tu ne quaesieris (scire nefas) quem mihi, quem tibi

finem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios

temptaris numeros. Vt melius quicquid erit pati!

Seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,

quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare              

Tyrrhenum, sapias, uina liques et spatio breui

spem longam reseces. Dum loquimur, fugerit inuida

aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. (Horace I.xi)

Anthology Wars

“The anthology wars” usually refers to the perceived competition between Donald Allen’s radical collection The New American Poetry 1945-1960, and Donald Hall & Robert Pack’s more conservative New Poets of England and America. I don’t intend to revive old factions or follow an antique drum; what I’ve been thinking about lately is rather a much more personal, circumstantial competition. Next month I’m going down to England for just under two weeks, and I’ll be visiting at least eight town and cities, shuttling between them mostly by train. On my periodical jaunts like this one, I always like to bring a poetry anthology or two with me – but the question is: which anthology, or anthologies?

I was started on this train of thought by a coincidence the other day. Browsing in our local Oxfam Books store on Byres Road, I swooped on a couple of items: the collected poems of J.H. Prynne – a pristine copy for £6 – and an apparently uninspiring anthology, The New Golden Treasury of English Verse, “chosen by” Edward Leeson (London: Pan 1980). I grabbed it because I actually used to have a copy, which had belonged to my paternal grandmother. She, Anne King, sadly died when I was about five or six – a huge shame, because she was evidently a very cultured and inquisitive woman. When I occasionally stay with my uncle in London, I often browse her old book collection, and always find some little marvel: last time, a signed copy of a volume by Roy Fisher. I think that’s a little bit beyond what most grannies have on their shelves. She was also a lay reader of a High Anglican persuasion; I always feel immense sadness that I never knew her except as someone who gave me Christmas presents; I’m sure we’d have got along famously. But her legacy to me has been distilled into two books, poetry anthologies she left with us: one, the Leeson collection; the other, John Hayward’s Penguin Book of English Verse. When I was sixteen, seventeen, I would go downstairs at night when I couldn’t sleep, make toast and a cup of tea, and read the poems in these books, particularly the selections from Eliot and Yeats. It was years before I realised I knew "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Among School Children" by heart, largely from these midnight reading sessions. It’s private moments like this, Proust’s “Days of Reading”, that seal one’s relationship with an author or a particular book; so please excuse the necessarily subjective tone of all this, which is as much reminiscence as review.

These two books have been my mainstay anthologies ever since, but both have had to be replaced: the Hayward was already beginning to disintegrate, as I think it was a first edition, and now the covers have gone, the first page of the index and pages 448-52 are completely severed, and the last few pages (everything from Auden onwards) are hanging by a thread, so I replaced it with a pristine copy a couple of years ago. The Leeson met a more unusual fate: I was in India, when a couple of people in our group were badly hurt in an accident involving a runaway 4x4, and we had to rush to the hospital; my original copy, plus a pocket volume of Shakespeare’s Henry V, were never recovered. So when I saw it in Oxfam the other day, I was very glad to pick it up.

But why was I so keen to get this particular anthology back – with an unpromising title, supposed to be an update of Palgrave’s, and edited by someone whom (unlike John Hayward) I have never heard of anywhere else, with no reputation as an editor or critic? Let me go over, more or less haphazardly, some of the features that I think distinguish this little book.

Firstly, range: John Hayward’s book starts with Wyatt and Surrey, a perfectly respectable point to begin from. But Leeson begins with four medieval lyrics – “Sumer is icumen in”, “I sing of a maiden” “Adam lay ibounden” and “Westron winde” – then gives extracts from Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Langland’s Piers Plowman, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales AND Troilus and Criseyde, Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, the whole of Dunbar’s Lament for the Makars (“Timor mortis conturbat me”), bits of John Skelton, and Gavin Douglas’ description of the Trojan Horse from his version of the Aeneid before he gets to “They flee from me that sometime did me seek”.

There’s not only greater historical range there, but linguistic too, with earlier forms of English (and later ones, like in the two poems by George Barnes in his Dorset dialect) as well as Scots (from Dunbar’s to MacDiarmid’s). Not only that: Douglas’s version of Virgil means that translation is getting more of a look-in. This is something Leeson is very good on, recognising the importance of translation for verse in these islands. He also gives us a similar extract from Surrey’s version of the Aeneid, one of Marlowe’s Ovidian elegies (Corinna), Chapman’s rendition of the death of Hector in his Iliad, and Dryden’s version of the Trojan Horse as well. Just as Pound said (of Horace, I think), one could make a quasi-scientific experiment just by taking the translations of Virgil to see how verse-writing has altered in history. (One would also like to see Tennyson’s fragmentary translation of the Aeneid to take it up to the Victorian period; but that was not a major part of his oeuvre, precisely because of the altered place of translation in the 19^th century.)

Most of these are, as I’ve said, excerpts, which is a bit of a shame. But again, Leeson scores points for longer poems. Spenser’s “Epithalamium”, Milton’s “L’Allegro”, “Il Penseroso” and “Lycidas”, Crashaw’s Hymn to St. Teresa, Marvell’s “Horatian Ode”, the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens (one of several ballads collected), Dryden’s “MacFlecknoe”, Jonathan Swift’s “Verses upon the Death of Dr Swift”, Pope’s “Epistle to Arbuthnot”, Johnson’s “Vanity of Human Wishes”, Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village”, Worsworth’s Tintern Abbey and the Immortality ode, Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (the revised version with the marginal glosses), T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock”, “The Waste Land” and “Little Gidding” – all of these are included complete, and most of those authors also get another, shorter poem – sometimes several more – as well.

That generous selection from Eliot is welcome, and, along with “Journey of the Magi”, beats the choices – “Gerontian”, “Ash Wednesday VI”, “Rannoch by Glencoe” and “Little Gidding” – offered by John Hayward, self-styled Keeper of the Eliot archive. Naturally, recent poetry is more difficult to choose from for the anthologist: Leeson goes for some Modernism (Eliot, Hulme, Lawrence), some Georgians (Brooke’s “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” – actually a very interesting poem, with bits of German and Greek interleaved, rather as the Modernists are famous for – Edward Thomas, Owen, etc.), some later ones (plenty of Auden, a smattering of other 30s and 40s poets like Empson, Dylan Thomas, Keith Douglas), and ends with Larkin, Gunn and Hughes. Being published in 1980, this anthology is obviously more up to date than Hayward’s, which ends with “Fern Hill”, and the selections are, I think, generally solid.

This is, however, where Leeson’s anthology runs into trouble. By the 20^th century, it becomes impossible (in the 19^th it was feasible but rather awkward and silly) to pretend that “English Verse” (leaving aside Leeson’s inclusion of Scots work) means poetry written in Great Britain. The complete absence of anything by Ezra Pound is bad enough, even before one remembers Whitman and Dickinson, or thinks of W.C. Williams, Marianne Moore, E.E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Robinson Jeffers, John Crowe Ransom, and Wallace Stevens – all of whom Hayward includes. And this is why I usually require a second anthology, to supplement the 20^th century.

But which one? Some very interesting modern anthologies are, I find, too narrow in range, usually for polemical or other editorial reasons, to satisfy me, like Alvarez’s The New Poetry, or Jon Silkin’s Poetry of the Committed Individual. Both, but especially the latter, contain great poems, as well as introductory essays that are important documents in their own right – which tells you a lot about the purpose of the book. But neither gives me a good dose of the key high modernists – especially Pound, always a litmus test for me. I have two editions of The Faber Book of Modern Verse: a reissue of Michael Robert’s original selection, with a supplement chosen by Anne Riddler, which isn’t bad on Pound, good on Hopkins and Allen Tate, but includes rather a lot by second-raters like Robert Graves (who always gives me a knee-jerk reaction) Sacheverell Sitwell, C. Day Lewis and Stephen Spender. I also have the edition revised by Donald Hall. Because of the previously-mentioned anthology wars, Hall is often seen as a conservative anthologist, which tends to mean a reactionary one, whereas in fact he is conservative is the best possible way, which includes the progressive element: his Penguin book, Contemporary American Poetry, in the enlarged second edition I have, features many of the poets from Allen’s New American Poetry, including Robert Duncan’s “Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” complete. If it wasn’t for the exclusively American content, it would be a strong contender for my second travelling companion. As well as adding in poems by Lowell, Geoffrey Hill, David Jones and others to the Faber book, Hall makes some brilliant additions to the selection of poets established by Michael Roberts – for instance, Wallace Stevens’ astonishing “The World as Meditation”. This is usually, then, the supplementary collection I take with me.

On reflection, I think I must be a bit of an anthology magpie, as I’m always looking out of interesting ones, like the Penguin book of Three Painter-Poets (Arp/Schwitters/Klee), James Gibson’s Let the Poet Choose (bought for 50p from the second-hand books bin of Frimley Park Hospital), in which the poets were allowed to selected two of their own poems, often making more interesting choices than are usually presented, and given space to introduce their exhibits. My girlfriend gave me as a Christmas present J.C. Squire’s Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets – some kind of joke there? But the one I still need to get – which I bought for a friend, so have had some experience of – is Ezra Pound and Marcella Spann’s Confucius to Cummings, which goes right back to the Greek (and Chinese) classics, takes in several languages (all the versions of which would stand as interesting specimens of translation in their own right), and includes Pound’s usual polemical notes as well as his jaw-dropping versions of Horace. For now, though, I’m glad I’ll have Edward Leeson’s brilliant New Golden Treasury to take with me next month.

(I've just seen that I could've got it for less than I paid in Oxfam, second-hand from Amazon, as you can see if you follow the link at the top. If you want a good poetry anthology for a couple of quid, I do recommend it.)