The New Penguin Book
of Romantic Poetry, edited by
Jonathan & Jessica Wordsworth

Penguin Books, 1056 pages, $20

 

When Francis Turner Palgrave published
his famous anthology,
The Golden Treasury, in 1861, he made his editorial standard
plain in the subtitle: “the best songs and lyrical poems in the
English language.” The word appears again, without apology, in
the first sentence of his preface: “the best original Lyrical
pieces . . . and none beside the best.” The formula echoes the
definition of culture itself, by Palgrave’s contemporary Matthew
Arnold, as “the best that has been thought and said.”

The Golden Treasury became a Victorian institution, helping to
define the taste of generations of readers. But to a
twenty-first-century reader, it is clear that Palgrave was very
far from including all the best English poetry. His book contains
only one poem by George Herbert, and none at all by John Donne;
Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is absent, along with Nash’s

“Litany in Time of Plague.” In a larger sense, Palgrave’s
restriction to lyric and song, entailing a near omission of
Dryden, Pope, and Johnson, now seems obsolete. He has left us
not a catalog of the best, but an image of his time.

Was Palgrave wrong, then, to make “the best” his standard? One
way of answering that question is to look at the sixth edition of
his anthology, edited by John Press and reissued in paperback in
2002. Press has added a fifth and sixth book to Palgrave’s
original four, carrying the selection forward from Shelley to
Paul Muldoon and Craig Raine. What Palgrave himself would have
made of twentieth-century poetry is hard to imagine, but,
remarkably, Press does manage to make his extension faithful to
the spirit of the original. He proves that the Palgrave
tradition—lyrical, formal, rural, elegiac—did continue into the
age of Modernism, in the Eliot of “New Hampshire” and “Marina,”

rather than “The Waste Land”; in the Auden of “Deftly, admiral,
cast your fly,” rather than “The Age of Anxiety.”

Assuredly, this is no one’s idea of the best twentieth-century
poetry. But by treating Palgrave’s choices as a taste, rather
than a standard, Press’s sequel shows us the coherence and
strength of the original Golden Treasury. It reminds us that
while no age can make an eternally valid selection of the best
poems, the effort to do so is an indispensable exercise in
practical criticism. Only by deciding on our own vision of the
best poetry of the past can we clarify our taste, sharpen our
judgment, and guide our own age’s creative activity. Our vision
of the past will even help readers of the future to understand
us, just as Palgrave offers insight into the strengths and
weaknesses of mid-Victorian poetry.

For an anthologist to seek out the best poems of his period, in
other words, is not the same thing as choosing a “canon” of
poems. The word canon is an unfortunate interloper in literary
discussion; with its ecclesiastical lineage and connotations of
infallibility, it imposes an alien metaphor on criticism. A canon
is handed down from above, but a literary judgment is always
offered up from within the fray. This does not mean that it can’t
have authority; rather, it has only the authority it earns, from
its intelligence, persuasiveness, and conviction. The difference
is akin to that proposed by Nietzsche, in “The Use and Abuse of
History for Life,” between “monumental history,” which sets a
monolithic past in judgment over the present, and “critical
history,” which makes a living past into the ally of the present.
A good poetry anthology is not a monumental object, but a
critical act.

Yet the latest generation of poetry anthologies seems determined
to evade that critical responsibility. Last year saw the
publication in paperback of two major historical anthologies:

The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse, edited by Roger
Lonsdale (originally published in the 1980s), and The New
Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry, edited by Jonathan and Jessica
Wordsworth (the former a descendant of the poet’s brother). These are the
new standard texts, and will help to define their periods in the
minds of students and general readers for years to come. But
while they do not omit the major poetry of their periods, both
books present that poetry in such a way that its real
achievements, and its continuing appeal, are obscured.

To compare them to their venerable
Oxford predecessors—The Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse
(1926) and The Oxford Book of English Verse of the Romantic
Period (1928)—reveals a fundamental shift, not just in the
selections, but in the purpose of the anthology itself. One index
of the difference is the new anthologies’ enormous growth. The
old Oxford Book of Eigtheenth Century Verse, edited by David Nichol
Smith, includes 130 poets; the new version has room for 234.
With the Romantic anthologies, the comparison is less precise,
since the old Oxford and new Penguin books define the period
differently, but of the fifty-one poets in the Penguin, sixteen
do not appear in the Oxford at all. Of course, this expansion
is not owed to the sudden discovery of dozens of important new
poets. It has to do with a shift in editorial emphasis, from
selection of the best poems to representation of a historical
period.

For Lonsdale, this shift was explicit and polemical, an attempt
to jolt readers loose from “traditional accounts of the nature and
development of eighteenth-century poetry.” Long before, Nichol
Smith had warned in his preface that when “historical interest”
joins “intrinsic” merit as a criterion, “The florist has begun to
develop, or to degenerate, into the botanist.” But Lonsdale, as
though in rebuttal, wanted his book to be “more representative of
the full range of eighteenth-century verse than most
collections,” and not “in any way definitive”: “The problem, if
it is allowed to be a problem, of what is ‘literary’ and what is

‘non-literary’ may well confront some readers at various points.”

In fact, the goal of Lonsdale’s anthology is to make it a
problem. He does not abandon the major eighteenth-century
poets—Pope and Swift, Johnson and Goldsmith are all present and
accounted for. But along with these peaks, he gives plentiful
examples of the valleys of eighteenth-century poetry. Here are
the inglorious Miltons who did not remain mute, but perhaps
should have: Edward Chicken, Stephen Duck, Samuel Jones, and
dozens of other comedians and grumblers, poetasters and amateurs.
Jones’s ambition was literally to be another Milton—two of his
three selections are subtitled “in imitation of Milton”—but he
couldn’t quite figure out how to do it:

Hail, happy lot of the laborious man,

Securest state of life, great Poverty,

To thee thrice hail!—————

Millions of active arms to thee each dawn,

Of supplications feminine devoid,

Erect their noble nerves,—————

There is something touching about those dashes, gamely filling in
the gaps in the pentameter. But to include a poet in an anthology
expressly because he is a bad poet
—an incompetent imitator of
the authoritative style—takes the goal of “representation” to a
new extreme. As Daniel Karlin, editor of the expanded 1997
edition of The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse, writes in his
preface, “it is arguable that such poetry—the poetry of the
commonplace, of received ideas and derivative language, of
conventional religoius and ethical sentiment … is indeed

representative of what the Victorians wrote and read, just as
it would be, mutatis mutandis, of the writing and reading of
other periods, including our own.” (Not coincidentally, Karlin’s
anthology, at 850 pages, is nearly twice as long as the previous
Penguin Book of Victorian Verse, edited by George MacBeth in
1969.)

By putting this principle to work, The New Oxford does
achieve a teeming lifelikeness: the eighteenth century becomes an
age of impolite letters. A favorite theme is the unhappiness of
marriage, which sometimes gives rise to earnest proto-feminist
protest, as in Elizabeth Tollet’s “Hypatia”: “What cruel laws
depress the female kind,/ To humble cares and servile tasks
confined!” Just as often, however, what looks like grievance is
really comedy, the same jokes about shrewish wives and bullying
husbands that go back to the Wife of Bath and forward to the
sitcom era. “Hussy, what I direct you ought to do;/ I’m lord and
master of this house and you,” declares the hero of Edward Ward’s

“Dialogue between a Squeamish Cotting Mechanic and his Sluttish
Wife, in the Kitchen.”

Lonsdale is especially partial to piquant anachronism. The
eighteenth century, too, he wants us to know, wrote about drug
addiction (“In Praise of Laudanum”) and abortion (“Epitaph on a
Child Killed by Procured Abortion”), not to mention cricket
(“Cricket. An Heroic Poem”) and what Thomas Mathison called “The
Goff”:

Full fifteen clubs’ length from the hole he lay,

A wide cart-road before him crossed his way;

The deep-cut tracks th’intrepid chief defies,

High o’er the road the ball triumphing flies,

Lights on the green, and scours into the hole.

In all these poems, Lonsdale’s purpose is not to preserve work of
aesthetic merit, but to offer bits of eighteenth-century life
preserved in the amber of rhyme. At rare moments, indeed, these
poems can be as movingly lifelike as the petrified victims of
Pompeii:

Adieu, dear life! here am I left alone;

The world is strangely changed since thou art
gone.

Compose thyself to rest, all will be well;

I’ll come to bed “as fast as possible.”

The force of Jonathan Richardson’s “On My Late Dear Wife” lies as
much in its notations—“Really dreamed, July 14–15, 1726”—as
in its painful homeliness. (The inevitable contrast with a
particular canonical poem—Milton’s sonnet “Methought I saw my
late espoused saint”—makes its homeliness all the more
effective.) Indeed, almost all of the unfamiliar poems Lonsdale
uncovers bear an invisible “really” in their title—they are
evidence of people who really lived.

The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse, then, shows
what a “representative” anthology can do at its best: it shocks
us out of our temporal provincialism. In the eighteenth century,
as in the twenty-first, people made jokes, played games,
suffered, loved, died. But who could ever doubt such a simple
truth? Only an age which instinctively disbelieves in the past
would need poetry to function simply as the past’s signature.
Lonsdale’s anthology practices what Nietzsche, in his third
historical category, calls “antiquarian history,” the mere
collection of facts, in which “everything ancient [is] regarded
as equally venerable.”

And when everything is equally venerable, there is no distinction
between art and documentation. The New Oxford does include
the major artists of the period, and its handling of their work is
actually more faithful than its predecessor’s. Nichol Smith
printed four excerpts from Johnson’s Vanity of Human
Wishes, with invented titles (“Prayer,” “Life’s Last Scene”)
that tacitly invite us to view them as separate lyrics; Lonsdale
publishes the verse essay in its entirety. Yet if
eighteenth-century poetry means Duck and Chicken, and dozens of

“Anonymouses,” as well as Johnson and Pope, then the very notion
of poetry—as opposed to the medium of verse—fades into the
background. It is by no means clear, to the casual reader and
especially to the student, why we should read eighteenth-century
poetry at all—read it, that is, with the intimate attention we
give to the spiritually contemporary. By making its period more
novel, The New Oxford paradoxically makes it less vital.

In its very different way, The New Penguin Book of Romantic
Poetry also works against the artistic appreciation of major
poetry. Here the number of writers represented is much smaller,
thanks largely to the fact that the Romantic period, unlike the
later eighteenth century, was in fact dominated by a handful of
poets. But while the book includes large samples of Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats, it is also generous to many
less signficant writers: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Letitia
Elizabeth Landon, Mary Tighe, and more.

As that list suggests, these poets are included mainly because of
their gender. That women wrote in the Romantic idiom, and in some
cases became well known for doing so, is presented as an
accomplishment in its own right, even though the quality of their
work is self-evidently inferior. (Even the Wordsworths can’t
evade this fact in their lukewarm endorsement: “Women writers,
who perhaps have not to the same extent stamped themselves on a
particular genre, emerge as strong in their variety.”) The point
is reinforced by the short biographies provided by the editors:
Smith and Robinson are each described as having been “married
off” to “worthless” husbands; the former was “forced to write a
novel a year to feed and educate [her] family,” while the latter

“subdued increasing physical pain by writing.” Humanly, no doubt,
these are important achievements. But by shifting the standard of
inclusion from the artistic to the human, the Wordsworths, like
Lonsdale, encourage us to see the sheer fact of a poem’s
existence as more important than its merit.

Needless to say, the inferiority of these particular poets has
nothing to do with their gender. Already at this period, women
writers were preeminent in the genre of the novel, and by the
time of the Victorians, women poets of the first rank had
emerged: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and, in
America, Emily Dickinson. Genius and gender are not linked. But
the weakness of the female poets in The New Penguin is
glaring. Take, for instance, Felicia Hemans’s 1835 sonnet
“Remembrance of Nature”:

Oh Nature thou didst rear me for thine own,

With thy free singing-birds and
mountain-brooks,

Feeding my thoughts in primrose-haunted
nooks

With fairy fantasies and wood-dreams lone;

And thou didst teach me every wandering
tone

Drawn from thy many-whispering trees and
waves,

And guide my steps to founts and sparry caves …

Clearly Hemans had been reading Wordsworth. But to compare this
poem to, for instance, Wordsworth’s “There Was a Boy” is to see
the difference between facility and genius:

         And when it chanced

That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill,

Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung

Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise

Has carried far into his heart the voice

Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene

Would enter unawares into his mind

With all its solemn imagery—its rocks,

Its woods, and that uncertain heaven—
received

Into the bosom of the steady lake.

Hemans’s Nature is conventional and pretty, her address to it
rhetorical and vaguely emotive. It has none of Wordsworth’s
dramatic concreteness, or his psychological acuity. Hemans writes
a poem on the theme of “nature,” where Wordsworth uses poetry to
study a mind’s encounter with nature. By treating them as peers,
the anthology reduces—and encourages readers to reduce—

these
poets to a common denominator, “Nature,” and thus to make
Romantic poetry an affair of subjects, instead of artists.

In fact, The New Penguin is organized by topic, not by
author. Both of these examples come from the section titled
“Ennobling Interchange: Man and Nature”; there are also
“Narratives of Love,” “Romantic Hallmarks,” and nine more.
Naturally, it is impossible to make these rubrics
consistent—Wordsworth’s sonnet on Toussaint L’Ouverture and
Shelley’s “England in 1819” appear under “Protest and Politics,”

not “The Romantic Sonnet.” Worse, it becomes impossible to see
how Byron, for instance, developed from brooding rebel
to mocking satirist, and how this development
expresses an inner truth about the limitations of Romanticism.
Instead, we have a static Byron writing to set topics assigned by
the Zeitgeist—“Romantic Solitude,” “Poets in Relationship,” and
so on.

In all these ways, The New Penguin, no less than The New
Oxford, works to redefine the way we read the poetry of the
past. Both are witnesses to the pervasive historicism of literary
studies: a disinclination to believe that the past and the
present can converse on equal, intimate terms. Of course, the
poetry of two hundred years ago can tell us something about the
state of society, or the intellectual preoccupations, of two
hundred years ago; but this is not its most important function.
The best poets offer what Matthew Arnold called, in an often
ridiculed but never superseded phrase, a “criticism of life”: a
subtle and comprehensive perception, expressed in form and
language as well as idea and argument, of life as it appeared to
one particular mind. To encounter a poet’s mind, there is no
substitute for reading as much of his work as possible,
preferably in the order it was written. That is what poetry
anthologies are for, and what these particular anthologies refuse
to do.

The coincidental appearance of anthologies from the eighteenth
century and the Romantic period, in particular, should be the
occasion for fruitful debate and revaluation. Much of what is
worst in contemporary poetry can be laid to the account of an
etiolated Romanticism, which Modernism—as Randall Jarrell
understood—did not so much repudiate as radicalize. There is the
Romantic narcissism which makes the poet’s every feeling sacred;
there is the Romantic Platonism which leads to an
ever-more-abstruse pursuit of the absolute; and there is the
Romantic esotericism which leads to disregard for the reader.

Of course, there has been and will be great poetry that is
confessional, metaphysical, and obscure. But at present, these
are not so much convictions as reflexes of our poetry, part of an
unexamined notion of what poetry can and cannot do. The best
remedy for this situation is to read Pope, Swift, and
Johnson—poets whose intelligence, urbanity, and formal mastery
the art today sorely lacks. (Shelley’s “Stanzas Written in
Dejection” and Swift’s “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” are
both classic poems of self-pity, but the throbbing emotionalism
of the former seems childish next to the ironic bitterness of the
latter.) For today’s poets, and for the readers and students who
constitute their audience, the most fruitful way to approach the
poetry of the past remains Palgrave’s: to search out “the
best . . . and none besides the best.”

---

Adam Kirsch, a book critic for The New York
Sun, won the 2001 New Criterion
Poetry Prize for his collection of poems The
Thousand Wells.