'The Oxford Book of Untrendy Verse'

I would like to endorse an offhand suggestion Robert Conquest makes parenthetically in his essay “A Note on Kipling’s Verse.” He is discussing the inevitable and tedious question of Kipling’s politics – imperialism and all that – when he writes: 

“Earlier critics of Kipling, Eliot among them, looked forward to the time when political partisanship would not prevent appreciation of his poems. And of course it is as absurd to be bound by these political parochialisms as by the aesthetic ones mentioned earlier: (what a brilliant collection The Oxford Book of Untrendy Verse could be).”

 

To my knowledge, after nearly half a century, no publisher, Oxford or otherwise, has taken up Conquest’s suggestion. How could they? “Untrendy” translates into “unpopular,” which translates into no sales. By “untrendy,” I take Conquest to mean poems likely to scan and rhyme, and not to conform to the pre-approved orthodoxies of the day. He means poems written by individuals, not committees, for individual readers, not focus groups. I have some suggestions for such an anthology, beginning with Kipling. Conquest says he had “a subtle mind capable of crudity, a sensitive mind capable of insensitivity,” like any competent and fully human poet. Here’s a poem that I’ve liked since I was a teenager that someone will surely find crude and insensitive, “Harp Song of the Dane Women” (Puck of Pook’s Hill, 1906), which concludes:

 

“Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her,

And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,

To go with the old grey Widow-maker ?”

 

The July 1970 issue of Poetry, a journal which today is unreadable, published a single poem, Turner Cassity’s forty-five-page The Airship Boys in Africa: A Serial in Twelve Chapters.” Let me suggest you visit the Turner Cassity Born-Digital Collection at Emory University, where Cassity worked for twenty-nine years. Who else would title poems “The Pleasures of Slave Owning” and “The Albino on Castro Street”?

 

Almost anything by Tom Disch will do, especially something from his final volume, About the Size of It (Anvil, 2007). In “’Ritin’, a Manifesto,” he brings back everyone’s favorite poet in the seventh grade, Robert Service. The poem concludes:

 

“So that’s why I say of all writers there are,

The best of the lot was Bob Service by far,

And all of you eggheads up there on Parnassus,

Should do jest like he did and get up off yer asses.”

 

Let’s not forget Robert Conquest, the guy who started this thing. Again, most anything will do, but here’s a limerick by the man who single-handedly redeemed that much-abused form:

 

“Said Pound, ‘If one’s writing a Canto

It should be a sort of portmanteau

Full of any old crap

That occurs to a chap

 With patches of pig Esperanto.”

 

[Conquest’s essay can be found in Rudyard Kipling: The Man, His Work and His World (ed. John Gross, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972).]

[ADDENDUM: Nige notes that The Faber Popular Reciter, edited by Kingsley Amis, may have had its origin in Conquest’s idea.]