Two New Anthologies of American Verse

Abstract

But there are many kinds of anthology. Some, like Edward Marsh's Georgian volumes (1912-22), or Bunting's and Pound's Active Anthology (1933), or A. Alvarez's Penguin New Poetry (1962), were illustrated manifestos. Others, like the Penguin Georgian Poetry (1962) and Poetry of the Thirties (1964), began their lives as inexpensive teaching instruments illustrating rather than influencing a literary movement or the taste of an era. Others, again, have outlined a genre, or even the work of a single author, like the late Stephen Whicher's excellent Organic Anthology of Emerson (Houghton MifHin, 1957), a chronological arrangement of letters, journal entries, essays and public addresses, fully supported by footnotes and introductory material. In all these cases, the act of selection was also one of criticism and instruction, and the partial or partisan nature of the selection was safely advertised in the title. But the anthologies that get into the papers and cause all the fuss those that seem most to justify the professionals' prejudice ? are the all-in collections representing whole cultures. These are truly national monuments. As such, they cause a great stir at their unveiling and, like the statue of General Du Puy, are widely considered to be rubbish in the end. Richard Ellmann's New Oxford Boo of American Verse attracted more notice than Geoffrey Moore's Penguin Boo of American Verse, appearing first and being bigger, but both had a pretty rough British reception.1 Geoffrey Grigson {The Guardian, 10 March 1977), labouring under the impression that Professor Moore is an American, associated him with the promotional activity which continues in and out of American embassies and American universities undertaken by salaried agents of American literature. Grigson deplored the idea of a representative saying that No poem can represent anything except itself. (Except for the American poem, which represents to Mr. Grigson an assault on English culture.) A more intelligent review, of Ellmann's anthology,