Any book titled Best-Loved Poems cannot help but encourage the obvious question: ‘“Best loved” by whom?’ Eyes naturally turn to the anthologist. While I admit that there was temptation to include the nursery rhyme that once brought fits of giggles from my infant daughter, personal preferences have been ignored. This book consists not of the classic verse best-loved by the anthologist, rather it is a gathering of English-language verse that is held dear by others, poetry for which many readers have an affection. Some of the verse featured is known to readers throughout the English-speaking world, while other poems extend their reaches no further than the borders of the nation in which they were written. As such, some verse may seem unfamiliar and unexpected. The poetry of the British Isles, that with the longest tradition, forms the greatest percentage of work included in this collection. Beginning with the seventeenth-century poet Anne Bradstreet, American poetry, too, forms a large percentage. These, too, are met with significant contributions by poets from Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
More than any other, an anthology of best-loved, traditional verse is conditioned by contemporary bias. After all, the intent is not to present poems that were once extremely popular, nor is it a goal to promote poetry that deserves more notice. This is a collection of verse that has withstood what we call, through cliché, the ‘test of time’. It is an unsparing trial that has reduced the profile of many poems and poets. In the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, the status of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was such that his place as America’s pre-eminent poet seemed unassailable. While Longfellow’s poetry continues to be read and appreciated – eight of his poems are included in this collection – he is no longer the dominant figure. If any poet can be said to be in the position once held by Longfellow, it would most certainly be his contemporary, Walt Whitman. Consider, too, the fate of another American poet, John Greenleaf Whittier. Once considered by his countrymen to be second only to Longfellow, such was Whittier’s popularity that after his death in 1892 – six months after that of Whitman – several states declared holidays to be celebrated in his honour. The status of Whittier has long since been diminished. He is represented here by only two poems, ‘The Barefoot Boy’ and ‘Laus Deo’, the latter a joyous celebration of the end of slavery.
Verse itself is not immune to the effects of time. Perhaps a measure of a poem’s popularity is the frequency with which it diverges from its original state: errors have been made and carried forward at the hands of typesetters, ardent admirers have copied out incorrectly, or simply mis-quoted, and the verse changes subtly. While the poems included in this volume have largely been kept in their original form, some reflect a small degree of ‘tweaking’, often intended to enhance the read for the contemporary audience.
Other poets appear as if rescued by time. Emily Dickinson, who lived to see only seven of her poems in print, all published anonymously, today stands as one of the greatest and best-loved of American poets. Looking back from this vantage point of nearly two centuries, it seems incredible that at the time of his death John Keats was not considered to be a poet of note. Returning to more recent times, we find that admiration of Bliss Carman, once considered the unofficial poet laureate of Canada, has declined, while the appreciation of his contemporary Archibald Lampman continues to grow.
In considering Lampman’s work – verse that is often cutting and critical, we realize that poetry need not be beautiful or sentimental to be loved. Indeed, some of the poems included, particularly those written during times of war, such as Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ and W. S. S. Lyon’s ‘I Tracked A Dead Man Down A Trench’, are by turns horrific, terrible and uncanny. Of course, this is expected of war poetry; and yet others managed to capture beauty and peace amid conflict. There is perhaps no greater example of this than Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’, the opening lines of which continue to echo:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
In verse, much of what is loved becomes so through familiarity. Whitman’s ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, written after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, was once considered a minor work. However, during these last two decades the poem has risen in the public conscious, beginning with Leonard Cohen’s homage ‘The Captain’, then continuing through its use in popular films such as Dead Poets Society. The most interesting revival might be ‘Cradle Song’, a three-centuries old poem by Elizabethan dramatist Thomas Dekker, which found use, with minor adaptation, in the Beatles’ ‘Golden Slumbers’:
Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise;
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby,
A collection of classic, best-loved poems stands apart from all other anthologies in that there is no concern for the influential, the significant, the representative or even the best. And yet, because of this disregard, and because of the focus on what it is that touches the reader, it might be argued that the simple designation ‘best loved’ provides the truest reflection of current attitudes toward English-language verse.
John Boyes, 2007