‘Here by effacement the poem is restored to unity’: The Genius of Francis Palgrave and the Golden Treasury - Part II

Don Paterson on the joy and misery of the anthology

Part II

So what did Francis Palgrave get so right? Well, some would say he didn’t. Palgrave claimed to have collected together the finest English poems. But the Treasury is a vision of English poetry with a strong Victorian filter, and never were filters rosier. Meaning that what we get is romantic, sentimental or heroic; musical and lyric; either quaintly rustic or pastoral or kailyard … There’s almost nothing of the urbane, of the oppidan, of argument, of ‘the ingenious’. There are, of course, almost no poems by women in the 1861 edition: a bit of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Jane Elliot’s ‘Flooers o’ the Forest’ and a couple of others. While any anthology which starts from Chaucer is going to reflect the historical inequalities of poetry publishing, it's important to point out that hardly anyone began to think of the exercise correctively until about thirty or forty years ago.

The Rattle Bag – lest we remember it too uncritically – featured only ten women poets in its hundred-and-thirty. In The Zoo of the New, whose poems were drawn from the last 700 years or so, Nick Laird and I got it up to one woman poet in four – which was still a very long way from ‘good enough’, but I’m afraid you’d have to take that up with history. (Kathleen Jamie, Peter Mackay and I hit the same problem with the Scottish Golden Treasury.) Turns out 7000 years of silencing and active discouragement rather thins the field. Who knew. The only way to even up the sexes would've been to include lots of inferior stuff, and diminish the many great women poets we did include. (Can I please stop having to pretend that Amy Lowell is any good? And while I’m moaning, can we please stop looking solely within male-constructed and -dominated Schools for all the neglected female talent in need of proper critical attention? There’s still lots of it, but I don’t think that’s where most of it is hiding. Some other essay, but many important women poets were understandably repelled by ‘schools’, which tend to be constructed around a top dog or a triumvirate.) The alternative would've been to include lots of in-copyright work that would've destroyed the book as a practical proposition. See part I for the financial explanation as to why.

‘Here by effacement the poem is restored to unity’: The Genius of the Golden Treasury, part I

It’s also worth being reminded that pre- Tom & Ez, the Metaphysicals were almost nowhere to be seen. They are barely present in the Treasury. The Augustans are also nowhere. There are no heroic couplets, there’s no satire, no blank verse … Iambic pentameter, the very engine of English dramatic and didactic verse, creeps in through Shakespeare’s Sonnets and not much else. (Technically, this means the poems in the Treasury are overwhelmingly written in various versions of the lyric, folksy four-stress line, the under-appreciated key to the book’s great popularity.) This is the danger of the personal selection. The Treasury patently does not represent the best of all of English poetry. But then its true purpose wasn’t overview, or accuracy, or fair representation. The point was that almost everything Palgrave put in was pretty great.

I think Palgrave’s decision to exclude contemporary work – he would not ‘anticipate the verdict of the future on our contemporaries’ – was an excellent one. No one can assess its merit, because it hasn’t had time to accrue any yet. Not that this stops us doing it. Young poets are always certain they live in a golden age; if it were left to them, they would include few poets beyond their brilliantly relevant coevals. But what they imagine the intrinsic value of their poetry is often just its extrinsic attitude, which is half the point of young poets in the first place: to take a stand, and demand a corrective to the inequities and distortions of the establishment and its canon. Today, ‘identity’ is still the main game in town, just as ‘class’ and gay visibility were in my day; in my mentors’ day, it was feminist corrective, and in their mentors’, anti-metropolitanism and fighting for the representation of the regions and the Celtic fringe. While one’s day passes quickly enough – the identity-obsession will eventually find its level, like everything before it – it always leaves the year ahead looking different in prospect. In time, I believe things tend to be changed for the better and the fairer.

Old poets, on the other hand, know that poetry has never been in worse shape, and would exclude everybody, bar themselves and their one remaining friend. I’m not even too sure about him, to be honest. But for those reasons, the young and the old can make poor anthologists. The young are too short-sighted and the old too long. Those who enjoy the brief, bifocal wisdom of the mid-river perspective (a mixed metaphor which seems to have conjured a specky fly fisher in waders; my apologies) know that the truth always lies in balance. Ideally, you want a book which looks both forwards and backwards, because those are the books truest to their own time.

Nonetheless, betting on future reputations is probably best avoided. Tennyson, Palgrave’s great friend and advisor, wisely insisted that his own poetry be left out of the Treasury – a stroke of genius, because he knew it would put the kibosh on Palgrave using any other contemporary work. Had he done so, it would have done nothing but draw attention to Tennyson’s absence. In vetoing his own inclusion, Tennyson underwrote the Treasury’s own longevity and success. (Palgrave’s contemporary tastes eventually proved as unreliable as everyone else’s: his ‘second series’ Golden Treasury of 1897 added poems by the recently dead Tennyson, but also a dire selection of the living.) Nonetheless, in early 1861, his publisher – that great Scot, Alexander MacMillan – tried to twist Palgrave’s arm. I wish you could get a few of Tennyson’s – though you exclude living writers, is not he an immortal already? I really wish my own exchanges with authors had been as classy. (’Sir! No John Glenday? Do his songs not already resound within the halls of Olympus? Of Jamie’s earthy pastoral, whereof? Is she not the tenth Scotch muse?’) Looking though Macmillan’s beautifully elegant correspondence with Palgrave, it was also hard not to A/B the exchanges between D. Paterson and N. Laird while we were compiling The Zoo of the New. ‘Are you just going to tell X I nixed him? Because if you do that I'll tell Y you nixed them. Watch Idiotsitter on Amazon it’s funny’ – being a randomly selected and entirely representative sample. The chances of arranging a bunfight between the British Library and Harvard for the privilege of archiving that stuff remains pretty slim. I blame the medium.

There are other pitfalls in anthologising the living. An anthology can offer an invaluable opportunity to showcase work new to readers. But anthologists are often as weak, suggestible, and unconsciously vindictive as the next person (which I just corrected from ‘as any other author’). And because of what Paul Ricoeur called ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’ – our daft critical default that all texts are now guilty until proven innocent – just about any engagement with the contemporary field will often be read as a series of sins of omission and commission, and motivated by either vendetta or nepotism. ‘A hiding to nothing’ is the phrase that comes to mind. I’d also like to make a found poem one day consisting of nothing but those exquisite little dances, the one that the poet performs red-faced and in their underwear – one I have shamefully performed myself – which takes the form of that slimy wee caveat in the introduction that goes: ‘my own poetry is included here with great reluctance, at the insistence of my editor.’ Uh huh. The problem was never better addressed than by ee cummings, who wrote:

mr. u will not be missed

who as an anthologist

sold the many on the few

not excluding mr. u

‘Mr U’ here is Louis Untermeyer, the poet and anthologist who, while he was better at the latter task, wasn’t that bad a poet; one almost forgives him for his self-inclusion, as one almost does Edward Lucie-Smith, whose excellent British Poetry since 1945 – a rare example of a great overview book covering a contemporary field – was a primer for so many of my own generation. They just couldn’t help themselves. Even Wavell included what he called, with appropriate modesty, ‘…a little wayside dandelion of my own’ as the last poem in Other Men’s Flowers.

The appalling Oscar Williams was another matter. Williams was hugely influential because he’d managed to arrange for his anthologies - in particular the Palgravianly titled Little Treasury of Modern Poetry – to turn up on the required reading lists on many US college courses, usually through the inclusion of the work of the compiler. Oscar was completely corrupt, and used his books not only as platform to profile his own lousy poetry, but the staggeringly bad poems of his wife, Gene Derwood. Randall Jarrell, the greatest poetry critic of the last century, notoriously described Oscar’s poems as giving the impression that they were ‘written on a typewriter, by a typewriter’, but only after Jarrell had already burnt his bridges with a review of the Little Treasury. He said that ‘… the book has the merit of having a considerably larger selection of Oscar Williams’s poems than any other anthology’, reflecting that ‘It takes great courage to like your own poetry almost twice as much as Hardy’s.’ W.D. Snodgrass reports that at the anthology’s next printing - not even its next edition, its next printing – Jarrell was sent a copy, with a bookmark in the place where Jarrell’s own poetry had previously appeared. This was, at the time, genuinely damaging to Jarrell’s career. And not only was Williams not above working an open quid-pro-quo – nor was he, allegedly, above posting incriminating photographs to the homes of poets to underline that any reciprocal promises should be honoured to the letter. There is a special place in hell for Oscar Williams.

My favourite version of the do-I-put-me-in dilemma is actually a Tennysonian absence: The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry was edited by my favourite living poet, Paul Muldoon, a choice Faber must have instantly regretted. In it, Paul more or less explored the set theory complexities of self-absence. He had already made the most insanely Palgravian choice - a mere ten poets were included in the book; but Muldoon then doubled down on his honourable self-omission by not just leaving himself out, but annihilating his own existence altogether. Instead of an introduction, there was an excerpt from an interview with Louis MacNeice. Given that even back then Muldoon was, by common consent, one of the most important living Irish poets, the book was now rendered self-evidently and gratingly incomplete. The cleverness of this almost situationist piece of publishing is so Muldoonian I could spend an essay unpacking it. But it remains a brilliant anthology, in the true sense, I think – provided you read it with a copy of Muldoon’s Selected in the other hand.

For all my enthusiasm for private enthusiasm, we are all our own blind spots. We need someone we can trust enough to point them out, and respect enough to take advice from. Hughes and Heaney’s The Rattle Bag was shaped through just that sort winnowing, to-and-fro conversation, and it’s why anthologies should probably have two editors. (The Rattle Bag’s genius, incidentally, was to claim it was ‘for younger readers’: this licensed its editors to include a great deal of relatively simple lyric or imagistic poems, re-recruiting for recent poetry an entire readership who had been repelled by the often gratuitous difficulties of modernism.) With Palgrave’s Treasury, it’s become routine to say that Tennyson’s influence is routinely overstated, but I’m not so sure. Yes, the book is largely the product of Palgrave’s excellent if peculiarly narrow taste, and of course it did no harm for Tennyson’s name to be attached to the project as firmly as possible. But I’m also pretty sure that his intervention will often have been decisive. Alf tended to get his way in the end.

Tennyson did, though, fail to convince Palgrave to cut back on the frankly insane amount of Wordsworth in the book. Palgrave included around 80 poets, though I think around 20 dominate. But one poem in seven is by bloody Wordsworth: 41 poems from a total of 288! But mad as that was, it’s another a reassuring token of Palgrave’s enthusiastic excess, and I’d rather a book erred in that direction. The one Wordsworth poem Palgrave conceded, by the way, is ‘Yarrow Revisited’, which he wanted to add to ‘Yarrow Unvisited’. ‘Yarrow Visited’ was already included, of course, but Tennyson insisted that this was a Yarrow too far, and that the first visit and the second non-visit were Yarrow aplenty. Palgrave did take on board Tennyson’s larger redactions, even if it took him thirty years to agree. Of Shelley's grimly hysterical ‘Life of Life …’– Tennyson said that it was ‘one of those flights in which the poet seemed to go up, and burst’, but it wasn’t slung out until the 1891 edition. Tennyson would also browbeat Palgrave into including a poem by reading it aloud, over and over, until its merits were self-evident, or Palgrave’s resistance was worn down, whichever was the quicker. Tennyson rightly insisted, for example, on Gray’s ‘Elegy’, whose pentameter didn’t fit Palgrave’s lyric four-stress rubric.

However Palgrave has to be commended for resisting some of Tennyson’s more outrageous edits. When Tennyson would come across a what he felt was a duff, obscure or tuneless line, he’d just fix it, without offering any justification but the infallibility of his own ear. I was delighted to discover, though, that Palgrave followed the practice of the late Michael Donaghy regarding editorial advice: he would thank Tennyson for his wise counsel, nodding away while he dutifully noted down all Tennyson’s corrections and suggestions in his manuscript, and then make sure absolutely none of them appeared in the final text. This would be slightly more admirable if Palgrave himself had been less of a slave to the dictates of his own taste and sensibility. For example, while Palgrave says that ‘a popular edition must necessarily contain omissions’, he didn’t just mean poets or poems. He also means bits he doesn’t like. He explains: ‘Sometimes a stanza breaks the current of thought, or refers onward to other portions of the writer's works. Here by effacement the poem is restored to unity.’ I line I confess that I stole immediately: I have often written ‘Here by effacement the poem is restored to unity’ in the margin, after I’d put a red line through a student’s dodgy stanza.

But the problem is always one of taste. The Victorians were perhaps the first to see themselves in the vanguard of progress, as opposed to knowledge-accumulation; so if a writer did not chime with the tastes of the age - Burns, say, or Marvell – that was simply a sign they’d become irrelevant to it. And yet who can disagree with Palgrave when he goes on: ‘Again, there have been writers of whom it is no presumption to assert, that their many gifts did not include the knowledge of when to stop ... No man is in truth so immortal that the world cannot afford to lose some drops of him.’ (A line I stole immediately: I have often written etc., etc.) To give an example of what we’ll charitably call Palgrave’s fearless editing: Philip Sidney’s sonnet ‘My true love hath my heart’ is eight lines long in the Treasury because Palgrave found the last six lines too ‘ingenious’. God forbid. The anti-lyric quality of ‘ingenuity’ is of course the reason almost no Elizabeth and Metaphysical poetry is included in the Treasury beyond Shakespeare’s. Palgrave hated the ‘ingenious’, on the grounds it cannot move you. He has a point, I suppose. Palgrave also routinely performed a kind of Reader’s Digest condensation on windy poems, slashing whole stanzas which offered no more than description or preamble.

Now while the (very) small scholar in me bridles at this, the editor is punching the air. I have to say – I’m intoxicated by 19thc ideas of responsible scholarship. The truth is that there are swingeing, blanket approaches you can take to culturally ingrained excess or habit. The Augustans would've been better with a hard edit. We could've made a lot of money in the 80s selling interesting verbs, of which we then had far too many, on the East European black market. Almost all Australian poets can be edited by requesting that they cut the first stanza (when they were just warming up, and whose essential contents can be inferred), the two stanzas before the end (which are usually just Beethovian extended coda), and the one in the middle (which is fascinating, but has nothing to do with the rest of the poem). Many English poets can be edited by insisting that all feelings needn’t be a source of shame, and therefore going in fear of every abstraction isn’t necessary. And so on. I’m joking. Sort of. But I envy Palgrave. All your authors being dead definitely makes the collaborative work of editing a whole lot easier.

But I’ll end with perhaps the most barbaric editorial intervention Palgrave made – and perversely it shows the reason I love and admire him so much. Without Palgrave’s excess of enthusiasm there would be no Treasury; without the Treasury to shape our taste and tune our ear, to give us high expectations of what ‘a book of poems’ should be – English poetry would not be quite what it is. So we should forgive him those occasions when, to adapt Jean Cocteau, he forgot ‘how far to go too far’ and went far too far too far. Because the Victorians couldn’t see they were terrible sentimentalists, Palgrave had an addiction to the exclamation mark, which he believed heightened feeling – where for us, it just renders feeling melodramatic. The exclam is the least useful of all punctuation marks in English poetry, since if you cannot convey your urgency or excitement by other means, you’re in trouble! (Personally, I try to stick to a one-per-book rule, unless I can convince me that more are really necessary.) Anyway, here is a poem by Wordsworth which Palgrave has subtly improved. See if you can spot where.

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,

With rocks, and stones, and trees!

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Don Paterson’s next event, How to Furnish the Cave of Making, is coming up on 18th June. Get all the details at northseapoets.com 🌊