The Oxford Book of American Poetry, ed. David Lehman
American poetry began with a governor’s daughter, a Puritan minister on the Massachusetts frontier, a ship captain who edited an anti-Federalist newspaper, and a slave. Often the best thing about these poets is their biographies. All but the captain were born outside the colonies; but, even before there was a United States, they wrote in the democratic helter-skelter of the New World. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, the verse written during the century and a half before the Revolution was “like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all.”
Anne Bradstreet leads off anthologies of American poetry because she’s the first American poet who wasn’t perfectly awful. Daughter of one governor and wife of another, she wrote with the high-minded clumsiness of the imperfectly educated.
Art can doe much, but this maxime’s most sure,
A weake or wounded braine admits no cure.
The early American poets were naifs with the memory of sophistication, like carpenters working with primitive tools under primitive conditions. There’s a quaintness to the work of the preacher Edward Taylor and the ship captain Philip Freneau and the slave Phillis Wheatley, but sometimes a queer rightness, too. When Taylor writes, about infinity, “Who in this Bowling Alley bowld the Sun?” you think how much Donne would have liked the metaphor; but you only have to compare the work of these poets to what was being written across the water by Dryden and Pope to see how bad the home team was.
The glimmers are the more disheartening for being only glimmers. Joel Barlow, the most technically accomplished poet of the Revolutionary period, wrote heroic couplets with the droll intelligence to bring them off. “The Hasty-Pudding” embodies the American drive to meet the British on their own terms and go them one better, even if he is competing with Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” a poem most of a century old, its style long out of date.
Poets born after the Revolution grew up in a different world, where Americans developed the self-consciousness necessary for a literary tradition not so intransigently innocent. This was the age of literary men who made their living as editors and lecturers and even poets, an age where the economies of leisure meant that a man could earn his bread by his words. Yet with that self-consciousness came a certain conservatism. William Cullen Bryant and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were poets of more power than originality, still looking over their shoulders to check what the British were doing; and with every backward glance they failed to behold the America lying before them.
We should wonder, not how an American at the age of seventeen could compose a poem as death-hunted as “Thanatopsis,” but why Bryant produced such porridge afterward. He’s not the only might-have-been in American poetry, just one of the saddest—his poetic powers were soon lost in “rosy depths” and “plashy brinks.” Edgar Allan Poe, on the other hand, is a reminder that our poetry has often depended on wounded oddballs more than literary men but that not all wounded oddballs make good poets—he wrote in a fanciful poetic diction coated in tar and set alight.
Emerson, though only a mediocre poet himself, was the first to see that there was an American poetry to be written. Imagine his excitement as he read a thin vanity-press quarto published by an anonymous author, a quarto titled Leaves of Grass. Walt Whitman, that American self-invention, was not the rough in a slouch hat he pretended to be but a Brooklyn printer and newspaper editor with an overactive imagination. He had seen the West only from the deck of a Mississippi sidewheeler; yet his longings held a mirror to the American soul, its taste for guilt and reinvention, its wanderlust, its love of its own raw language. Whitman gave Emerson exactly what he’d asked for, a poet of our “ample geography” who could make use of “our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, … our boasts, and our repudiations.” More than he ever realized, Emerson was responsible for Whitman’s imposture and masquerade.
We must not forget that secret sharer who influenced American verse in more subterranean ways. Emily Dickinson’s self-mutilating psychology and silvery unhappiness give a differential specimen of the American character. A bloodless recluse in Amherst, indrawn as a clam, she developed her own shorthand language, one so powerful the rhythms borrowed from hymns seem resolutely her own. Dickinson wrote almost half her poems during the Civil War, scratching out a poem a day during the hard year of Shiloh. Perhaps something of the horrors far to the south touched the death fantasies within her. From these two damaged psyches, American poetry has borrowed more than it cares to admit; yet our poetry was just as tormented and even more deeply molded by the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and many another Briton. It was our language and our landscape that we were a long time accepting.
The dirty secret of American poetry is that until Whitman and Dickinson it was no damned good, and until the modernists it was not good again. It takes only ten pages for the new Oxford Anthology of American Poetry, edited by David Lehman, to get through the seventeenth century, and ten more for the eighteenth. The whole nineteenth century takes fewer than two hundred, half of these devoted to Whitman and Dickinson. After that, for nine hundred pages, it is one long diet of the twentieth century.
Lehman, though a poet himself, is better known as editor of the annual series The Best American Poetry and author of Signs of the Times, an attack on deconstructive literary theory . The Oxford Book of American Verse, as it was first known, was edited by the distinguished scholar F. O. Matthiessen in 1950 and, as The New Oxford Book of American Verse, revised by the equally distinguished Richard Ellmann in 1976. Lehman’s introduction, a good deal of it a defense against his predecessors, lives in a prose world where assumptions are governing, essays seminal, and stock always goes sky-high. He’s proud of what he calls the “widening of focus” here, though it’s hard to see why this isn’t just “out of focus” by another name. Matthiessen, as Lehman notes, included 51 poets, and Ellmann 77; Lehman has 210, a quarter of them born between 1940 and 1950. This grotesquely overrates the wartime and baby-boom generation, still an amorphous crowd of genial talent through which Lehman offers no path.
A good anthologist must have a few bizarre quirks, though preferably not too many. Lehman’s catholic taste and appreciation of minor voices make him ill at ease with major ones. Take his treatment of the moderns, the most radically complex generation American poetry has produced. Robert Frost, whose dark American pastoral is heir to Dickinson’s private shadows, produced such a crop of famous poems it’s difficult to leave any out; but Lehman offers too many of the chalk-board set pieces beloved by generations of high-school teachers. Marianne Moore’s most disturbing animal poems and the later meditative poems of William Carlos Williams are ignored. Wallace Stevens finds himself naked without even a stanza from his long poems, while T. S. Eliot is begrudged the roustabout humor of the Sweeney poems or “The Hippopotamus.” And Ezra Pound, poor Ezra Pound, hardly sets foot here, receiving fewer pages than any of the others despite his influence on a century once called the “Pound Era.” After the moderns, the next major American poet is … W. H. Auden! Auden lived in New York for some thirty years and wrote poems about his adopted country; but it’s odd to include a poet of such English intonation and character, especially with poems written, a few of them, before he’d ever set foot in America.
Lehman is such a democrat, he can hardly bear to leave anyone out (sixteen of the eighteen editors of The Best American Poetry are included, and the missing pair were born after 1950, the cutoff). It’s one thing to leaven the majors with wits like Dorothy Parker or kooky originals like H. Phelps Putnam (who wrote, among other things, a pair of sonnets about genitals), quite another to try to revive the long dead reputations of Emma Lazarus, Adelaide Crapsey, Angelina Weld Grimke, Samuel Greenberg, Leonie Adams, Mark Van Doren, John Wheelwright, and dozens of other trivial worthies (even on a bad day, a battered stanza by Eliot makes these poets look like a dish of mealworms). In a lengthy anthology, this means there are vast desert spaces between the poets worth reading.
The editor has wisely not welcomed song lyrics, though he has wavered enough to include one hymn, two blues, and a song by Bob Dylan; yet I miss a section of American folk songs and ballads. We’re given little more than “Casey at the Bat,” that great American paean to failure. None of the poets, Lehman claims, has been favored for race or gender (too many anthologies balance the great white males of the past by ignoring the lesser white males of the present); but it’s no improvement to offer, as representative of contemporary poetry, a swarm of mediocre white men and almost as many mediocre white women.
Lehman’s introduction is not much help in coming to terms with his taste. He’s suspicious of overanalyzing poems and would prefer that readers experience a poem’s “uncanny mysteriousness,” which sounds like the credo of the Know-Nothing Party. (This may explain the book’s frustrating lack of notes. It can’t explain why the poems are littered with errors.) “I prize, as do many readers,” he declares, “eloquence, passion, intelligence, conviction, wit, originality, pride of craft, an eye for the genuine, an ear for speech, an instinct for the truth”—this must be more gaseous blather than any anthologist has fit into one sentence for a long time.
As Lehman nears the present, his choices grow off balance and whimsical. John Ashbery receives twice as many pages as Pound and almost three times as many as Robert Lowell, who might just as well never have written his extraordinary early poems. (You can get the idea of Ashbery in two pages—almost everything after that is sludge.) It’s simply madness to reduce John Berryman to half a dozen pages and Randall Jarrell to five (scanting his great war poems), while lavishing eight on Charles Bukowski and ten on James Schuyler. Lehman’s fondness for the Beats and the New York School (their glamour largely faded now) means that Allen Ginsberg and Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara are given acres of elbow room, though Ginsberg is weirdly denied Howl, the most famous poem of the postwar period. The strangest inclusion is the Canadian Anne Carson, here because she “has taught in the United States and has a wide following among younger poets”—with standards like that, you could include any poet who ever came here for a long weekend.
Reading through the poets even younger, I’m drawn to some I’ve frequently criticized—to the strangled psychology of Louise Gluck and C. K. Williams’s voyeuristic confessions, to the smudged Turneresque landscapes of Charles Wright and Jorie Graham’s MRI cross-sections of consciousness. Yet far more pages are wasted on giddy, crowd-pleasing poets like Billy Collins and James Tate. Worse, the younger poets are getting older—the youngest in Matthiessen was thirty-three; the youngest in Ellmann, forty-two. The youngest in Lehman is fifty-five, and at this rate the baby in the next edition will be over seventy.
Anthologies age as badly as fashion, and the pillbox hats and pearls of one generation must give way to the tattoos and tongue studs of another. It took a long while for the most distinguished press in the mother country to notice that Americans wrote poetry at all; but where Oxford’s first anthology of American verse could have been carried around in a small handbag, the new one has to be wheeled around in a shopping cart. This bloated, earnest, largely mediocre new Oxford takes up a lot of space on the shelf without providing a clear view of our moment. That chance won’t come again for another generation.
100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century, ed. Mark Strand
In Greek, an anthology meant a bouquet. The existence of such bouquets tells us two things—that the ancients liked cut flowers and that they found themselves short of time. Mark Strand’s 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century has trouble figuring out what it wants to be, and his introduction is hedged with excuses for what it is. You might make all sorts of assumptions after reading the title, and the introduction is in a hurry to tell you how wrong you are. The editor announces, in a somewhat embarrassed fashion, that the poets come only from the Americas and Europe (one manages to straggle in from Australia), that no poet was born after 1927 (or, if foreign, somewhat later—there’s a Danish poet as young as seventy), that each poet is permitted the star turn of only one poem (though due to an editorial mishap one poet had to be given two), and that an attempt was made to balance the usual suspects with others scarcely guilty of anything.
After the editor’s nervous apologetics, you’re grateful he does not invoke, as anthologists almost ritually do, poetry’s Luminous Richness, or Humanizing Power, or any of the broad claims that make reading poetry irritating and being a poet a torment. You are not spared, however, the reassuring knowledge that the poems chosen “require no special knowledge for their appreciation” and that in the editor’s opinion they “can be read more than once without diminishing their power to persuade, amuse, or entrance,” statements that come with a whiff of condescension.
A reader might be forgiven for wondering who needs such an anthology, since anyone who loves poetry will be depressed to see Eliot’s “Prufrock” or Auden’s elegy for Yeats, poems any tenth grader should know, yet taken aback to find Elizabeth Bishop represented by a diffuse and overly earnest poem like “In the Waiting Room” (much beloved by scholars of “identity”) or Yeats by the laggard “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz.” The editor might answer that he means to be provocative; but surely readers unfamiliar with poetry ought to be given the best poems at hand, while familiar readers ought to be jostled and stirred by every page—it is difficult to serve both masters. A good poetry anthology requires taste combined with irrational prejudice. There are poems here by Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, and Dylan Thomas already collected to death, and poems good enough by poets who have written much better (it’s hard to choose a weak poem by Frost, but Strand has succeeded). Any anthologist who includes Alan Ansen instead of Randall Jarrell or Edwin Muir instead of A. E. Housman comes from a region where the bears are princes.
Poetry has never been entirely the preserve of men, though until the present generation you had to look very hard to find women, so it is perhaps understandable that the editor has looked a little too hard and included mediocre work by mediocre poets like Louise Bogan, Ruth Stone, May Swenson, and Edna St. Vincent Millay (responsible for the anthology’s worst line, “White against a ruddy cliff you stand, chalcedony on sard”). Readers who already adore Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, however, will be grateful, if they don’t know her work, for a typically charming and idiosyncratic poem by Amy Clampitt.
Half the anthology consists of poets born in the United States or Great Britain, which leaves the other half for the rest of the world; and as a result the quality there is somewhat higher, or would be in that utopia where translations are better than the originals. Alas, the reader limited to English may wonder why anyone would bother reading Neruda, Hikmet, Akhmatova, or Alberti. A reader must usually take poets in translation at a deep discount (it’s odd that wit translates better than humor, since you’d think it would be the other way around)—it’s a miracle that the reader sees a glimmer of the gifts of Rilke and Cavafy, Pavese and Tsvetaeva. Translation may be a bad business, but it’s the only business for the monoglots Americans have become.
100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century, its title reminiscent of the marquees that used to line Broadway (“100 Dancing Girls 100”), is unlikely to convince new readers to throw down their tabloids and pick up a book of poetry. What might do so would be an anthology much more personal and crotchety, full of poems the anthologist simply and helplessly loved—whatever the promises of the introduction here, too many poems seem like timeservers or pensioners, included out of a desire to please (or, worse, a desire not to offend). It may seem ungrateful to complain about an anthology so catholic in its tastes; but the former poet laureate is one of the few poets who could produce an anthology worth the reading, and he has wasted an opportunity. Anthologies like this are published for occasions on which a present is traditional but diamonds too expensive. Never meant to be read, the guilt book ends up on a thrift-store shelf, with forlorn inscriptions like “Happy Birthday” and “To the young graduate with love from Cousin Jake.”