Review: The Oxford Book of English Verse ed. Christopher Ricks

In the days when there was actually a general audience for poetry, that audience's taste was both formed and reflected by anthologies which generally were created by by lovers of poetry -- the phrase, though it may sound pretentious, is the accurate one -- whose books were a quite conscious effort both to form and to reflect that taste. Today things are different: poetry has become largely an academic enterprise, and accordingly current anthologies tend to reflect not the taste of a general audience but the specialist jockeying that goes in English departments. There could hardly be a better example of this trend than Christopher Ricks's edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse.

The book does have its points. Scottish poetry, traditionally a poor cousin, has been given something like its proper prominence. The selections from Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, whether or not they theoretically belong there, sure sound good. Matthew Arnold's "The Scholar-Gipsy", that bane of generations of sophomores with term papers due, has been reduced to a handful of stanzas which usefully demonstrate how bad a poem it really is. But taken as a whole, we find in this book that the anthologist's mission of portraying the sweep and blood of poetic tradition has been sacrificed to the department head's need not to hurt the feelings of anyone at the faculty meeting. It's not that the poems chosen are not worthwhile (though I for one could have done without Anthony Thwaite's tiresome poetry establishment in-joke of a poem consisting of all the names from Contemporary Poets, or Swinburne's really disgusting ode to foot fetishism and necrophilia, "The Leper"), it is that the necessity of satisfying all scholarly claimants leaves insufficient room for the poets and poems who really count.

Thus we find the ancient roots of English song cut back almost to nothing, Donne demoted to an eccentric intellectual rake who got religion at the end, Byron a writer of verse novels which must have seemed quite shocking in their day, a Yeats unstained by politics, and an Eliot who wrote one memorable poem about a sad case named Prufrock wandering about London, as well as a number of interesting experiments -- the book omits all but eight lines of "The Waste Land"! There could be not better indication that this anthology neither leads popular taste nor follows it: it is hermetically sealed from it, and it represents the final transformation of the anthologist as lover of poetry into the anthologist as professor. Its poems are not episodes in the great epic of which all poems worth knowing are a part, but specimens; the book is not really an anthology, but a syllabus, and it gives us the great body of English poetry with its heart cut out. Those who want at least one major anthology of poetry in their library would do better to get this book's predecessor, The New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1950, still available, or better yet, the book I consider to be the best single poetry anthology, The Atlantic Book of British and American Poetry by Edith Sitwell out of print but still available used.