Only in retrospect is history inevitable. While the fighting is going on, there is no guarantee that Napoleon will lose the Battle of Waterloo, the North will prevail in the US Civil War, and the Allies will defeat the Axis powers in World War II. This is as true for literary reputations as for military struggles, and the metaphor of battle is deliberate and meant to make a point; it would be naïve to imagine that writers, novelists, playwrights, and poets do not compete for mortal stakes, though usually they do so without fisticuffs.
If it were money or fame they desired above all else, poets would surely turn to entertainment vehicles that please the internet millions. No, the competition has to do with merit, or the perception of merit, and the vagaries of reputation. Poets gamble on posterity’s verdict. The drive to succeed has something to do with reconciling work and need, as Robert Frost puts it in the last stanza of “Two Tramps in Mud Time”:
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sake
For poets who associate poetry with freedom, a release from obligations, a holiday, writing is “play for mortal stakes,” a wager made by persons who know they will never learn the outcome of their bet. They write for the posthumous fame or glory that is nowhere conferred but may be recorded someday in an official-sounding anthology. Reputation is fickle. Emily Dickinson, who dismissed “publication” as the “Auction / Of the Mind of Man,” died unknown; Emma Lazarus did not live long enough to know that her sonnet “The New Colossus” would come to articulate the meaning of the Statue of Liberty. Nor do the prizes a poet receives while alive guarantee a lasting readership. Edmund Wilson, aged seventy-one, got worried when he received an honor, because “an accepted reputation can be derived from no real merit whatever.”
A commonly used metaphor for literary reputation is that of the gyrations of the stock market. Shares of Shelley reached new highs through most of the nineteenth century but crashed in the 1920s when first T. S. Eliot and then F. R. Leavis and others put out “sell” recommendations on the English Romantic poets in general and Shelley in particular. At the same time, and for overlapping reasons, every English department across America took a strong position in such “metaphysical” poets of the seventeenth century as John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and George Herbert. It was the equivalent of a peaceable revolution, a nonviolent overthrow of the existing order.
Then came the counterrevolution, the pendulum swing in the 1960s. At Yale, the Romantic poets made a strong comeback. The most brilliant professors were invested not in the metaphysical poets but in Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. At the time, the contemporary poets most honored in the academy, such as Robert Lowell and John Berryman, became the poets of the establishment—a terrible label to get stuck with, since what chance would they have against the icons and luminaries of the counterculture? Lowell, Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and others exemplified the “confessional” line, which seems, alas, to terminate in suicide or madness. In the 1960s, struggle for control of the literary center was taking place along an age fault, and youth cast its ballot decisively for the anti-establishmentarians—for Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, Frank O’Hara and the New York School, and other dissenters from the status quo.
Following the political unrest and upheaval of that turbulent decade, literary people—professors, poets, poetasters, journalists, agitators, and radicals of all descriptions—began to contest the whole idea of a canon, the value of establishing hierarchies, the importance of required reading lists or even of required courses. A galloping skepticism took the field. There were, to put it mildly, negative consequences. We gained in our appreciation of American popular culture, but at the same time we witnessed a general lowering of standards, taste, and discourse; the folly of grade inflation in our universities; a decline in civility; and a growing ignorance of history.
One good thing that happened was the recognition that a narrow canon, a single line of literary descent stretching, say, from Emerson and Whitman to Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, is no longer viable. Such a conception of tradition would not be adequate to the variousness and abundance of either American poetry or the spirit that animates it. We have embraced the notion that it is possible to accommodate, if not to embrace, seemingly incompatible impulses. Whitman spoke for many when in “Song of Myself” he wrote, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” If at one time you had to choose between T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams, that time is past. You can respond with enthusiasm, or at least respect, to poets from opposing camps. John Ashbery didn’t much care for Robert Frost, but I, an ardent advocate of Ashbery, love Frost’s “dark and deep” woods, his solitary paths. Frost’s formal mastery astounds me; “Meeting and Passing” is one of the great modern sonnets. Like Wallace Stevens, Frost is equal to traditional metrical demands. Stevens uses blank verse with a meditative elegance (“We live in an old chaos of the sun”); Frost joins the iambic meter to the casual and personal, as when he manages a crucial pivot in “Birches”: “So was I once myself a swinger of birches.”
The maker of an anthology can’t help being aware of the contemporary reputation of poets. But he knows, too, that this enterprise, this book, will be a chance to amend that reputation.
*
It may be that we are living in an age of poems, rather than of poets, and the annual Best American Poetry anthology, consisting of 75 poems by as many different poets, has advanced that trend. The question of poetic value pressed itself on me in a concrete way when I edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). Its mission is to represent American poetry from its origins to the present, and at 1,100 pages (plus front matter and index), it is as big as an old-fashioned one-volume encyclopedia. Even so, there are limits: you can’t include everything or everyone.
The previous edition, titled The New Oxford Book of American Verse (1976), was assembled by Richard Ellmann, the estimable Joyce biographer and Yeats scholar. His book consisted of the work of seventy-eight poets. I chose 210, and only thirty years separate the two volumes. Why the difference? I decided not to restrict the book to major poets, however one defines “major,” but to find space for minor poets, and even one-shot wonders. The door would be open for poets previously neglected because of their race or sex. The change in title from “verse” to “poetry” allowed me to incorporate prose poems. For a few practical reasons (permissions fees, space limitations) I had to exclude the great lyricists of the American songbook, but the example of Langston Hughes (“The Weary Blues”) was all the justification I felt I needed for including Bessie Smith’s “Empty Bed Blues.”
“Anthologies are, ideally, an essential species of criticism,” wrote Randall Jarrell in Poetry and the Age. “Nothing expresses and exposes your taste so completely—nothing is your taste so nearly—as that vague final treasury of the really best poems that grows in your head all your life.” Every dedicated reader is perennially compiling, enlarging, and revising such an ideal anthology, which can never be “final” or definitive any more than a published anthology can be exhaustive. Anthologies are selective, and as such they are exercises in criticism. Their job is not simply to reflect accurately what is out there, but to pick and choose among the possibilities. Whether the books set out to reinforce the prevailing taste or to modify it, they sometimes end up doing a bit of both. Anthologies can educate, can recruit new readers, can even create the conditions by which the new poetry may be savored and in time perhaps even understood, it being the usual case that enjoyment precedes understanding.
All anthologies perform an evaluative function. Even where the claim is less absolute than in the title of The Best American Poetry, anthologies praise their contents. Donald Allen’s New American Poetry, 1945–1960, the most influential anthology of the 1960s, which introduced a generation of readers to the Beats and Black Mountain, the New York School and the San Francisco Renaissance, may seem to have a neutral, descriptive title. But does anyone doubt that new here performs the function of best? Anthologies single out works worthy of perpetuation, and thus they always constitute a prediction, an assertion, and a wager. Of The Oxford Book of American Poetry, the implicit claim made for the contents is that they are a representative sample of the best that the history of our poetry has to offer. No matter how we construe great and best in an age as relentlessly relativist as ours is, we cannot do without these terms, they enter our speech sometimes unbidden in the flush of excitement, they express the admiration we think will last.
Helen Vendler has written against “historically representative anthologies” in which the aim is the comprehensive coverage of a given era. She noted that the first two volumes of a Library of America anthology devoted to twentieth-century American poetry added up to 1,800 pages: “So many feeble poets; so many non-moving poems; so many withered dictions; so many sterile experiments. And so much pretentiousness; so much well-meaning polemic; so much prose masquerading as poetry; so many dubious poetics.” While I disagree with Vendler’s assessment of the two volumes, a contemporary anthology invites ridicule in these harsh terms if it professes to be value-free or if it subordinates poetry to sociology, ethics, or politics. An editor has nothing else to trust but instinct and taste in putting together an anthology of poems that refuses to be to American poetry what a “passive” index fund is to the stock market.
*
Discoveries or revivals may be the single most exciting thing about the endeavor of anthology-making. Here is a poem by Josephine Miles (1911–1985), a poet overshadowed in reputation by another poet born the same year, Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979). Born on June 11 (as were Ben Jonson, Irving Howe, William Styron, and I), Miles suffered all her life from rheumatoid arthritis so severe it confined her to a wheelchair. She became a scholar and in time a university professor at Berkeley, where she taught for thirty-eight years. Among her students were the poets A. R. Ammons and Jack Spicer. Kenneth Rexroth, a rival in San Francisco poetry circles, denigrated Miles’s early poems, calling them “small, very neat holes cut in the paper.” But it seems to me that her brief, oblique, sometimes riddling poems make her an authentic heir of Emily Dickinson.
For The Oxford Book, I selected Miles’s poem “Ride” (1955):
Ride
It’s not my world, I grant, but I made it.
It’s not my ranch, lean oak, buzzard crow,
Not my fryers, mixmaster, well-garden.
And now it’s down the road and I made it.
It’s not your rackety car but you drive it.
It’s not your four-door, top-speed, white-wall tires,
Not our state, not even, I guess, our nation,
But now it’s down the road, and we’re in it.
“Ride” has music, it wakens thought; it has symmetry, it reverses that seedy cliche about “a world [I] never made,” and it makes you wonder about the meaning of those seemingly simple words made and my and your and our.
Miles’s poem “Reason” (1955) is a second poem I picked:
Reason
Said, Pull her up a bit will you, Mac, I want to unload there.
Said, Pull her up my rear end, first come first serve.
Said, Give her the gun, Bud, he needs a taste of his own bumper.
Then the usher came out and got into the act:
Said, Pull her up, pull her up a bit, we need this space, sir.
Said, For God’s sake, is this still a free country or what?
You go back and take care of Gary Cooper’s horse
And leave me handle my own car.
Saw them unloading the lame old lady,
Ducked out under the wheel and gave her an elbow,
Said, All you needed to do was just explain;
Reason, Reason is my middle name.
“I like the spare and active interplay of talk,” Miles said in a note explaining why “Reason” was a “favorite” poem of hers. “I like the idea of speech—not images, not ideas, not music, but people talking as the material from which poetry is made.” This insistence on the American idiom as it is actually spoken saturates her poems with reality and makes them feel still fresh.
Like Miles, the achievement of May Swenson (1913–1989) is eclipsed by that of Elizabeth Bishop, two years her senior, with whom she had a long and emotionally complicated friendship. Born in Utah, Swenson spent most of her adult life in New York. Her poems have been desperately undervalued in the academy. In The Oxford Book you will find her 1954 poem “Question,” notable for the poet’s deft handling of the mind-body problem—the idea that the body and the spirit are two separate and sometimes warring factions of a divided self. The knowledge that human identity can outlive the human body animates this poignant poem:
Question
Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt
Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead
How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye
With cloud for shift
how will I hide?
Even when reading it aloud you can hear the line-breaks—can hear the assuredness of the pace of this poem full of questions and haunted by the one large question that titles the poem but is left unstated in it: what will happen to me when I die?
In 1972, Swenson wrote “Staring at the Sea on the Day of the Death of Another,” a poem that moves in the “classic” manner from the death of another in the present to the inexorable approach of the poet’s own demise that is to come:
Staring at the Sea on the Day of the Death of Another
The long body of the water fills its hollow,
slowly rolls upon its side,
and in the swaddlings of the waves,
their shadowed hollows falling forward with the tide,
like folds of Grecian garments molded to cling
around some classic immemorial marble thing,
I see the vanished bodies of friends who have died.
Each form is furled into its hollow,
white in the dark curl,
the sea a mausoleum, with countless shelves,
cradling the prone effigies of our unearthly selves,
some of the hollows empty, long niches in the tide.
One of them is mine
and gliding forward, gaping wide.
This beautiful procession of sounds conjures up the waves in their succession, “immemorial” as the sea yet temporal as music. I commend her description of ghosts in the sea, “the prone effigies of our unearthly selves.”[1]
Not until I edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry did I realize the versatility of the two-line poem as a form. Consider “The Old Man” by Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976), a Jewish New Yorker trained in the law who recorded what he saw on his walks in the city and who found in old law journals the stuff of narrative (as in the books he wrote under the title Testimony). “The Old Man” dates from 1969:
The Old Man
The fish has too many bones
and the watermelon too many seeds.
The poem is absolutely concrete in its imagery and incontrovertible factually. Reznikoff, whom literary historians consider an objectivist, paints the character of everybody’s “old man” by grumbling accurately in his accents. “Too many,” “too many”; look at the work this reiterated phrase performs.
In contrast, here is an epigram (1942) in the Latin manner by J. V. Cunningham (1911–1985), a student of Yvor Winters at Stanford University. Cunningham, who held a bachelors degree in classics and a doctorate in English, sets store by wit and elegance. Notice here the double meaning of “lie,” the word ending the first line and beginning the second one:
An Epitaph for Anyone
An old dissembler who lived out his lie
Lies here as if he did not fear to die.
About the only thing the Reznikoff and Cunningham poems have in common is that they consist of two lines each. I think a strong case can be made for both, and for a third two-line poem, “Their Sex Life” (1990), by my Ithaca neighbor and friend, the late A. R. Ammons:
Their Sex Life
One failure on
Top of another.
The two lines are in perfect balance, three words per line: they are like parallel lines that never meet—or like husband and wife. The key word is “failure,” but the sublime gesture is performed by the line-break that separates “one” from “top,” and places “top” on the bottom. This is, I believe, the only time Ammons capitalized a line when the lower-case alternative would have been grammatically correct.
*
Of every anthology the question may be asked: On what basis were these poems chosen and not others? An insistent pleasure-principle tops my criteria. “Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible,” W. H. Auden observed. A poem must capture the reader before it can do anything else, and to do that it must give pleasure both immediate and sustained. I also ask of a poem that it hold something back—enough to compel a second reading and make it a surprise. Like other readers, I prize eloquence, passion, intelligence, conviction, wit, pride of craft, an eye for the genuine, an ear for human speech, an instinct for the truth. Yet I know such a list can be dismissed as merely rhetorical and thoroughly subjective. So be it. Literature is personal; the making of an anthology is an intensely personal act.
The word innovative has long served as a term of singular praise. It has not been enough to write well; it has been thought more important to be original than to be excellent. Among the poets who have strenuously resisted the Pound imperative (“make it new”), the case of Richard Wilbur is instructive. The virtues of his verse include intelligence, tact, mastery of forms and meter, a flawless ear, a seemingly effortless fluency. Yet because he is in so many ways a throwback, and in so few ways a reflector of the Pound-and-Eliot climate of opinion, Wilbur’s name rarely comes up when assessments of recent American poetry are made. Here is an early Wilbur poem entitled “Boy at the Window” (1956), in two symmetrical stanzas, elegantly rhymed, ending with a line of robust iambic pentameter:
Boy at the Window
Seeing the snowman standing all alone
In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.
The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare
A night of gnashings and enormous moan.
His tearful sight can hardly reach to where
The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes
Returns him such a god-forsaken stare
As outcast Adam gave to Paradise.
The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,
Having no wish to go inside and die.
Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.
Though frozen water is his element,
He melts enough to drop from one soft eye
A trickle of the purest rain, a tear
For the child at the bright pane surrounded by
Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear.
This poem with its neat dichotomies—the boy at the window, the snowman outside, and the tears that link them—is, I would submit, excellent in every particular, but it doesn’t pretend to be innovative. It doesn’t refuse traditions but works within them; it is comprehensible and careful; and it rejects the shock tactics and angry improprieties that the former LeRoi Jones, for example, put into his poetry of rage.
*
The making of The Oxford Book of American Poetry was a modest practical effort at revising the canon: judiciously, I hope, and astutely, reflecting not only the editor’s taste, but the advice and opinions of other poets, critics, students, and readers. American poetry is in a constant state of flux, and I felt the excitement of encountering the poetic in elegant wordplay as in the noisy terms of mass culture. American poetry is Kenneth Fearing’s comic-book energy in “Dirge”: “Wham, Mr. Roosevelt; pow, Sears Roebuck; awk, big dipper; bop, summer rain; / Bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong.” Yes, but it is also the uncanny punning of James Merrill in “Syrinx,” in which “the scale of love and dread” impels the poet to summon the musical scale: “O ramify, sole antidote!”
Three poets born in 1925 illustrate the diversity of mood in modern American poetry. Kenneth Koch animates the language in one poem (“One day the Nouns were clustered in the street”), makes poetry out of the insincere apology in a second poem, and adapts the apostrophe to his own purposes (“To World War Two”). Carolyn Kizer presents the views of “The Erotic Philosophers,” a gathering of “sunny innocents” who “sit here drinking kir / And reading Kierkegaard.” Donald Justice, master of melancholy and nostalgia, contributes a terse lament “On the Death of Friends in Childhood,” a “Self-Portrait as Still Life,” and a downcast “Villanelle at Sundown.” There is quite a lot of variety there.
Prior to undertaking The Oxford Book of American Poetry, I hadn’t realized that Lincoln Kirstein, George Balanchine’s partner in establishing the New York City Ballet in 1946, was every bit as good a versifier as Auden had proclaimed upon the appearance of Kirstein’s Rhymes of a PFC in 1964. Nor had I recognized the imaginative erudition of Howard Nemerov, whose poem “Style” identifies and summarizes two novels that Gustave Flaubert never wrote.
*
Some editorial decisions are not difficult. Whitman will get the most pages; Dickinson will have the greatest number of poems; the rule against translations will be waived to allow for Pound’s “River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” and John Hollander’s magnificent rendering of “The Bird” from the Yiddish of Moishe Leib Halpern. Which of Marianne Moore’s versions of “Poetry” should I choose? She revised it more than once. My solution: print both the original (1919) and the radically truncated version she selected for her Complete Poems in 1967. What to do about T. S. Eliot, who went from America to England, and W. H. Auden, who left York and became a New Yorker? Richard Ellmann omitted Auden on the grounds that he “seems English to the bone.” Knowing how important a figure Auden was in the city he adopted, I disagree—and see no reason to omit either.
The Oxford Book presented me with an opportunity to showcase marvelous poets who, though they may not equal Whitman or Dickinson in stellar luminosity, deserve an honored place in the firmament. Some were once celebrated, later deprecated (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Amy Lowell); some were overlooked because of their race (James Weldon Johnson, Angelina Weld Grimké); some stood outside the mainstream (Charles Bukowski, William Bronk, Joseph Ceravolo) or excelled at an activity that overshadowed their poems (the dance critic Edwin Denby); some are finer than critics had realized (Emma Lazarus, Phelps Putnam); some died too young (Joan Murray, David Schubert) or toiled in obscurity (Samuel Greenberg) or are simply unjustly forgotten (John Wheelwright, Elinor Wylie, Howard Moss).
There is the opportunity to correct the oversights of predecessors. F. O. Matthiessen’s 1950 edition of The Oxford Book of American Verse has much to recommend it, but one of the six rules governing his hand was “not too many sonnets.” It was perhaps this consideration that blinded him to Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” and Weldon Kees’s “For My Daughter.” Richard Ellmann brought tremendous intelligence to The New Oxford Book of American Verse in 1976, but he settled for the 1892 “deathbed” version of Song of Myself while I would argue that the 1855 version is far superior. Another Ellmann error is the utter omission of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the most brilliant of our sonneteers. She could reliably “put Chaos into fourteen lines”:
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply;
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain,
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
There is more than a whiff of the distrust of greatness, the denigration of genius, in the current climate. As the series editor of The Best American Poetry, I can furnish ample proof that many people feel uncomfortable with the word “best” in the title. Marketing considerations are involved, but the title is not just a commercial ploy. It is a sensible way for an editor to operate. How often has one been told that people don’t read poetry. To the extent that there is truth in the truism, much depends on overcoming that natural resistance. To capture the fancy of an audience, you need to reach that audience, and you cannot do so without making an aggressive claim for the poems you are presenting. Let us then by all means round up the usual suspects, splendid as they are: Dickinson’s “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!,” Robinson’s “Miniver Cheevy,” Stevens’ “The Snow Man,” Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” Roethke’s “The Waking,” Jarrell’s “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” O’Hara’s “Day Lady Died,” Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended,” Schuyler’s “Hymn to Life.” Let us do what we can to revive interest in Longfellow; let us celebrate the terse irony of one Crane (Stephen) and the expansive vision of another (Hart); let us enjoy what Elizabeth Bishop does with the sestina and the villanelle. Let us compare Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror” with “The Mirror” of Louise Glück, Kay Ryan’s “Failure” with a poem of the same title by Katha Pollitt, and let us consider how Auden, Williams, and Berryman treat pictures by Brueghel. Let us press our suit with conviction, not with the half-heartedness of J. Alfred Prufrock, though he, too, has his prominent place at the banquet. Rather let camerado Whitman guide us among the many voices competing for attention, reserving space for the “forbidden”:
Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.
Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.
[1] Does it need to be said that my praise of Miles and Swenson implies no disrespect to Elizabeth Bishop, who merits her very high reputation among poets of all stripes?