`That Sweet Accord is Seldom Seen'

I owe much of my literary education to a man I never met who died in 1964, the year I turned 12. Oscar Williams was not a memorable poet but his anthologies have sold in the millions and helped educate generations of students and autodidacts. For a long time, if an English-language poet was not included in a Williams anthology, I probably had never heard of him. I still remember buying The Pocket Book of Modern Verse, published by Washington Square Press, at James Books Store on Ridge Road in Parma, Ohio. That would have been around 1965. The store was owned by Lenny James, a raffishly dubious guy who wore his shirt outside his pants and who was reputed to sell dirty books and take bets on the side. We liked him because his books were cheap, often with the front cover torn off and the reduced price scrawled in black marking pen on the title page – inelegant but inexpensive. It was in Lenny’s store that I graduated from comic books (Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos) to Immortal Poems of the English Language, also from Washington Square Press, and The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse, published by Pocket Library.

I bring this up because I happened upon another poetry anthology, Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969), selected by Yvor Winters and Kenneth Fields, and began to think about how useful and influential anthologies can be, especially for those of us who come as innocents to literature, as I suppose all of us do. I read the Williams collections naively, front to back, as though they were novels. That had the advantage of giving me a sense of the grand sweep of poetry in English. Simultaneously, I was figuring out which poets I liked, which I disliked, and which left me confused: Pope, good; Swinburne, bad; Hopkins, inconclusive. That ranking still reflects my tastes, except I’ve upgraded Hopkins.

The Winters-Fields strategy is more didactic, less inclusive and superbly readable – an excellent albeit eccentric introduction to poetry for students. You’ll find none of the canonical Romantic poets, not even Keats, and only one from the 18th century – Charles Churchill. After Churchill (1731-1764), the next selection is an American, Jones Very (1813-1880). You’ll find Stevens and Williams but no Whitman, Hopkins, Pound, Eliot, Frost, Moore, Crane, Bunting, Auden, Bishop, Berryman, Larkin, Hecht or Hill. The book includes 185 poems, by 48 poets from the last 450 years. Fields calls them “the most remarkable poems in English.” The editors say the poems “share important qualitative resemblance,” and go on:

“The kind of poetry which we are trying to exemplify does not consist in a specific subject matter or style, but rather in a high degree of concentration which aims at understanding and revealing the particular subject as fully as possible….in selecting our anthology we have tried to find writers whose attitude toward their art resembles Ben Jonson’s, as we see it in one of his best love poems:

“`And it is not always face,
Clothes, or fortune gives the grace,
Or the feature, or the youth;
But the language and the truth…’”

There’s not a mediocre poem in the volume, which begins with Sir Thomas Wyatt (c. 1503-1542) and ends with two poems by N. Scott Momaday. The poet represented with the most poems – 16 -- is one of Winters’ former students, J.V. Cunningham. He’s among the supreme American poets, along with another former Winters student included in the anthology, Edgar Bowers. The editors and Fields took this Cunningham poem from Trivial, Vulgar, and Exalted:

“I had gone broke, and got set to come back,
And lost, on a hot day and a fast track,
On a long shot at long odds, a black mare
By Hatred out of Envy by Despair.”

Again, from the introduction:

“And whatever else poetry may be, its medium is language – poetry is communication. Those poets who fail in their responsibilities to the public aspects of language, concentrating instead on the private or eccentric aspects, impair their ability to reveal, to themselves as well as to their readers, the reality of their experience. Such poets, however brilliant, are landlocked and are accordingly out of touch with life….If a poet concentrates exclusively on the public nature of language, the result will usually be the cliché; if he concentrates on the private nature, the result will be obscurity. In either case, reality has eluded him, his mind is dead. The poets of this anthology, on the other hand, are consistent in one respect: they are interested in understanding and revealing, are interested in the language and the truth. They are engaged in the quest for reality.”

This is an admirably sane conception of poetry, perfectly reflected in the poets and poems selected for inclusion, and perfectly crafted as an introduction to poetry and literary history for young people. The resulting anthology is the best I know, better than Williams’. It’s also a useful corrective to today’s tin-eared poetry. Consider the poems used at epigrams to Quest for Reality. First, Wyatt:

“Throughout the world, if it were sought,
Fair words enough a man shall find;
They be good cheap, they cost right nought,
Their substance is but only wind.
But well to say, and so to mean,
That sweet accord is seldom seen.”

Then, oddly, George Turberville (c. 1540-c. 1610), whose work is not included elsewhere in the anthology. Here is “To the Reader”:

“I thee advise
If thou be wise
To keep thy wit
Though it be small;

“’Tis rare to get
And far to fet
’Twas ever yit
Dear’st ware of all.”

As Fields writes in the introduction:

“Such triumphs of language are always rare and necessarily emerge from a great deal of unsuccessful writing. And if the exceptional poem is a rare occasion, so too is its appreciation.”