Poetry

Some of the best of 1941's good verse anthologies:

P: The Viking Book of Poetry (Viking; $3.50), compiled by Richard Aldington, is, by & large, the best compendious poetry anthology in the English language. Less elegant than Palgrave's Golden Treasury, less aristocratic than Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of English Verse, it is bigger around the waist than they are, represents in its format and arrangement a superb job of publishing. Anthologist Aldington, in making his selections from the entire body of English and American poetry, tries less to hit a poetical bull's-eye than a poetical barn door. His misses are few. All the great and nearly all the minor ancients are fully, and in a few cases fulsomely, represented; contemporary poets receive mostly only token representation. People who tend to bloat when reading classic pieces can get relief, in The Viking Book, from its citation of one of the best literary carminatives ever written (taken from Boswell's Life of Johnson):

Hermit hoar, in solemn cell,

Wearing out life's evening gray,

Smite thy bosom, sage, and tell,

What is bliss? and which the way?

Thus I spoke; and speaking sighed;

Scarce repressed the starting tear;

When the smiling sage replied:

"Come, my lad, and drink some beer."

P: New Poems: 1940 (Yardstick Press; $2.50) is selected by Oscar Williams with his eyes glued on his belief that "The poet is a man without a profit or any other kind of ulterior motive. He is free to tell the truth as he sees it, whether it is disaster or the resurrection." In practice this seems to make Editor Williams feel that unless a poem tells its readers something disastrous or resurrectional it is not a poem. His anthology contains much overwrought poetic material that could all suitably be grouped under Contributor John Berryman's observation: "Whippoorwill calling, excrement falling." But the book also contains very fine poems by R. P. Blackmur, Marianne Moore, Delmore Schwartz, others.

P: Reading Poems (Oxford; $2.75) is as remarkably all-of-a-piece an anthology as has ever been compiled. It is edited by two American professors of English, Wright Thomas (Wisconsin) and Stuart Gerry Brown (Grinnell), and is "intended, in general, for anyone who wishes to develop the skills needed in the intelligent reading of poems . . . rather than the history of poetry." All of its poems, whether written by Shakespeare or Spender, Milton or MacNeice, conspire to show what noble, or at the least persuasive, music words can make. Its critical discussions are written with an excess of the subsidized self-assurance peculiar to English professors. But none of that leaks into the anthology's text--which is like one great organ pipe, with the life-breath of generations blowing through it.

P: The Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry (Macmillan; $2.50), edited by Hugh MacDiarmid, is a definitive collection of Scottish verse (much of it written in the Scots' language); and the editor, in an introductory essay as prickly with his native thought as a Highland moor is with heather, goes a long way towards putting Scottish poetry into its right place in the total perspective of the world's literature. Scottish poetry, Editor MacDiarmid points out, is capable of being both genuinely literary, and popular with the common people--something that English poetry has never succeeded in being. Editor MacDiarmid makes this point only as an aside in his attempt to show that Scottish poetry "incomparably exemplifies" his belief that "Life is Mind out for a lark."

Readers of this Golden Treasury will recognize that it is a serious lark, as well as a gay one, that Editor MacDiarmid is speaking of:

The rose of all the world is not for me, I want for my part Only the little white rose of Scotland That smells sharp and sweet--and breaks the heart.

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