Barker Fairley on Charles Doughty

Abstract

John Hayward's recent anthology of nineteenth-century English verse includes nothing by Charles Montagu Doughty. Hayward was an excellent anthologist. He read for himself and chose sensibly, with an eye to past as well as to contemporary taste. He included such old favourites as "Breathes there the man, with soul so dead," or "She walks in beauty, like the night," without whose customary appearance a selection of nineteenth-century verse would be like a lopped tree; but he also managed to find space for more of John Clare's verse and Thomas Hardy's than has been usual, in response to the interest of the moment. He omitted dramatic verse in order to make room somehow, but he was not frightened of the long poem, as so many of us are. He printed the whole of "Bishop Blougram's Apology," an heroic choice; and The Prelude, Don Juan, and In Memoriam are represented in decent extracts. He knew that the long poem was essential for an understanding of the poetic consciousness of the century. But even so, he included nothing by Charles Doughty: length can have had nothing to do with this exclusion, though Doughty wrote one of the longest poems of the century.