Jacket 15 — December 2001 | # 15 Contents
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Richard Caddel reviewsAnthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry by Keith Tuma (ed.)New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 019512894X. xxxiii, 941pp. No price given.This piece is 2 300 words or about six printed pages long. |
WE ANTHOLOGY EDITORS should stick together. Keith Tuma opens his preface by recalling a former anthologist, Edward Lucie-Smith’s comment that “to publish an anthology is to turn oneself into a pheasant on the first day of August” — a remark which Tuma’s annotations assistant Nate Dorward should surely have glossed for some readers, but which basically means, as I’ve found, that you become a target for critics. Tuma then continues with this analogy to suggest that “some pheasants are fatter targets than others”, and that few anthologists seek to encompass such a large period as a whole century, or, he might have added, such a diverse and prolific one, over such a large, diverse and changing geographical area. |
But I suspect that for many British or Irish poets, the overriding impression which the last century has left is not of a neat, organised pheasant shoot, but of a protracted civil war, or at least a series of shifting partisan or guerrilla engagements which have left few participants unscarred. So that many of the surviving British or Irish poets could perhaps be forgiven for feeling, is this it? as they scan Tuma’s “map” (his word) and recognise little in the way of detail in the actual terrain as they knew it. But that’s not the point: this is not a volume of veteran’s memoirs (thankfully) but A Book To Tell The Young People — “This anthology will have achieved its loftiest goal if it makes newer, younger readers want to search out poetry as it lives beyond this book, in individual volumes by the authors included here and many others beside them,” says Tuma. Phew. In short, it’s a teaching anthology, a college textbook, with all the hallmarks thereof: numbered lines for class teaching and discussion of poems, critical and biographical introductions to each poet, some bibliographic information (but sadly, given the goal stated above, no publisher information), copious annotations of, for instance, local language and external sources (by the inexhaustible Nate Dorward, who should, in my opinion, have at least a title page credit for his contribution) and that comfortable D-shaped rounded spine when, as mine has, it’s been lying open most of the time for a week or so. |
And as such, this is indeed a quietly revolutionary anthology, in that it presents (as the back cover blurb says) “ample selections from canonical poets” (we’ll suppress questions about whose canon for the present) alongside “many poets... who have never before been represented in this type of collection”, and even “paying special attention to neglected modernist traditions”. Accordingly, it’s broader in its coverage than others in the genre, and this is most welcome — to me, at least. The possibility — and desirability — of such a broad-based anthology has been raised before in a variety of discussions (such as the british-poets listserv) and other contexts (though it is seldom, in my experience, urged by adherents of the “canonical poets” approach): in his useful anthology “ A State of Independence” (Stride 1998) editor Tony Frazer concludes: “Anthologies in recent years have tended to be “official” or of the corrective “antidote” variety, such as this in part seeks to be: there is room for someone to draw the strands together.” Most poets, however wide their reading habits, are deeply committed to their own practices and by definition to some extent partisan, and would thus shrink from such a task, however enthusiastic they may be about the final product.
Although Tuma recognises, and is clearly part of the movement seeking to rectify, the long history of neglect of the “modernist / experimental tradition” — however one describes it — in Britain and Ireland, he does little to explain how this circumstance comes about. The often-stated and preposterous critical idea that modernism is essentially an American phenomenon, and therefore was inappropriate “here” is, of course, summarily dealt with, both in the preface and in the selection, where time after time long-overlooked exponents of that tradition are “rediscovered”. I suppose in order to tackle the causes of this thorny issue of neglect he’d have had to get nasty, to engage in the cultural and economic realities of poetic life as it’s been lived daily in Britain and Ireland for years, which, apart from lying beyond the scope of his mainly literary critical preface, would have jeopardised the appearance of broad-church consensus which the anthology is at present able, at first sight, to wear. In truth, the background to this neglect has been described on many occasions, not always in the most balanced, temperate or non-partisan terms — perhaps this is another reason why Tuma felt he should steer clear of it.
However, I don’t want such comments to detract from my welcoming of this anthology, which I’ve called “quietly revolutionary” within its genre, and which is certainly an enjoyable and interesting read (“interesting” is one of the words of high praise in Tuma’s assessment of the century’s poetry). I can only applaud Tuma and Dorward for their industry in making the book, and Oxford University Press New York for having the courage to publish it. I hope they make efforts to distribute it in the UK, where a broader perspective is sorely needed. |
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Jacket 15 — December 2001 Contents page This material is copyright © Richard Caddel and Jacket magazine 2001 |