But Just Ourselves

I do so like the popular poetry anthologists. Like their scholarly counterparts, they tend to a deserved anonymity, but unlike their academic relations, they make little or no claim beyond sustained affection for the ghosts they gather; no reputations are secured or reclaimed, no schools or periods named or set, no points scored or made. Editing their little treasuries, all the popular anthologists, from the earliest to the latest, seek only approval, and sales. The headings under which they arrange their selections tend to nothing beyond the most trite themes of "Love & Romance," or "Poems Patriotic," or "Faith, Religion & Meditation." This, as with the popular anthology as a category of books, is meant to appeal to the broadest possible audience of elderly persons recognizing the graduations of young cousins once or twice removed, or grandchildren, inscrutable, still dutiful, but distant. These collections of "best remembered," "best loved," or "best read aloud," tend to the safely dead, the copyright-free and the familiar, if not to present readers, then to our ancestors. These are the little sepulchers of reputation, tended, swept and kept clean by the dearest of anonymous souls.

These popular anthologies are not to be confused with those of a more instructional, if by no means necessarily educational, intent. The weighty Nortons of the world, never so much "edited" as lengthily introduced, footnoted, and annotated to a Talmudic impenetrability, are no more meant to be read than phonebooks. The Norton Anthologies are intended to be purchased at a price commensurate with their substance, to be consulted like a Bible, by chapter and verse, to be highlighted and tabbed, and to have their multiple white end-papers and wide margins bluntly defaced. Such books are designed for single owners, their usefulness to end with the quarter and the term. The idea of anyone searching out any but the most prescribed edification in such sloppy monsters is like someone looking to find a Filet Mignon in a side of beef: a task best left to professionals.

When "best" becomes "greatest" in an anthology, again, the likelihood is increased that some purpose beyond the simple pleasures of reading and remembering is intended; a poll has been taken, a publisher's backlist archive plundered, a laureate invited to select favorites, or, more likely, the laureate has been handed the individual poems or essays about individual poems, and been asked to write an introduction, or tie a bow on the pretty present. "Best" is a cozy word, "Greatest" a challenge. (I personally can not hear that word, "Greatest," used, without somewhere in my head, hearing the echo of Ali and Howard Cossell.) Such pugnacious anthologizing depends for sales on the reviewers taking issue, on disputed rankings, on favorites left out. Without a proper dust-up of some kind, there wouldn't be much point. There are real entertainments to be found in such matches, but usually less in the selections themselves which, when not completely predictable, can seem completely arbitrary, even perverse. (Perhaps the most hilariously subjective anthology in history, edited by a major poet, would be Yeats' Oxford Book of Modern Verse , infamous for including multiple poems by the woman he happened to be fucking, Margot Ruddock, and other friends such as Shri Purohit Swami - that immortal of English Verse -- while dismissing most of the WWI poets and many of the Moderns. History, it is now fair to say, has not endorsed many of Yeats' claims for the greatness o' his mistress & pals.)

The Random House Treasury of Best Loved Poems, now in it's Third Edition, though I still keep the cuter Second Edition, is the current standard of the popular anthology: keeping John Greenleaf Whittier and Joel Barlow evergreen, the anonymous product of unsung genius, like When Mother Reads Aloud in print, but with room for Kipling and Shelley etc., in small doses, as well. The print is large, the book small. William Ernest Henley's Invictus may be read out loudly, with one hand free to be placed o'er the heart.

My favorite anthology, still in print and affordable from Dover Publications, Inc., has to be Martin Gardner's Best Remembered Poems. Gardner, a personal hero of mine, provides not only a wonderfully justified and bizarre selection, but also most amusing notes. Clearly Gardner understands the value of and shares my own pleasure in antiques. Where else might one so easily find both Rose Hartwick Thorpe's Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight -- "And her breath came fast and faster,/And her eyes grew large and bright..." -- Jabberwocky, Recessional, Little Orphan Annie, The Purple Cow, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox's Solitude, cheek by jowl with Blake's Tyger, Burns' Mouse, and She Walks in Beauty? Had Gardner included Whittier's Barbara Fritchie, my happiness might have been all but complete. (It is in the Random House Treasury.)

I would encourage anyone not troubled by snobbish fears of being seen in coffee shops reading beribboned little books, to seek out either of my favorites, but be warned: it is all but impossible, to read the otherwise unknown Richard Hovey's poem in Gardner's popular anthology, without declamation and appropriate gestures. Go on, just try:

The Sea Gypsy

"I am fevered with the sunset,
I am fretful with the bay,
For the wander-thirst is on me
And my soul is in Cathay.

There's a schooner in the offing,
With her topsails shot with fire,
And my heart has gone aboard her
For the Islands of Desire.

I must forth again to-morrow!
With the sunset I must be
Hull down on the trail of rapture
In the wonder of the sea."

How can one not, I ask you?! How much good, clean fun was that? Delightful. Immortality be damned.

"And my soul is in Cathay..."