'The Range and Liveliness of Poetry'

I heard from a high-school classmate who remembered the time in A.P. English our senior year when the teacher had us form small groups, select a poem and prepare a discussion. At my suggestion, our group picked “The Groundhog” (1934) by Richard Eberhart (1904-2005). Note its conclusion: 

“I stood there in the whirling summer,

My hand capped a withered heart,

And thought of China and of Greece,

Of Alexander in his tent;

Of Montaigne in his tower,

Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.”

 

In my reading of it, I identified Alexander as representing the worldly man; Montaigne, the man of intellect; St. Theresa, the woman of the spirit. I had heard of Montaigne but hadn’t yet read the Essays. Three years later, when I spent the summer in Europe, mostly in France, I carried The Complete Essays in Donald Frame’s translation in my backpack (with Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano and a Blake).

 

My point in recalling this story is: 1.) to illustrate the importance of anthologies to my education. Some people get snobbish about them. I don’t. I first encountered the Eberhart poem in a collection edited by Oscar Williams; 2.) to stress yet again the interconnectedness of all books, all human learning. Montaigne has lead me to dozens of writers, new and long familiar. That’s how tradition works. To ignore or “cancel” it is to choose ignorance over delight. The poet Thom Gunn (1929-2004) in the posthumously published “An Apprenticeship,” tells a complimentary story:

 

"[D]uring the Blitz I was evacuated to a school in the country, where an enlightened English teacher taught from The Poet’s Tongue [1935], an anthology edited by W. H. Auden and John Garrett. It was a remarkable selection for a child to encounter in 1941, very different from the poetry books which you got in other schools, and which were all Lord Macaulay and the patriotic speeches from Henry V. In the introduction to The Poet’s Tongue, poetry was defined as ‘memorable speech,’ still the only workable definition I’ve come across; and the anthology itself emphasized the range and liveliness of poetry, by including mnemonics, popular songs, mummers’ plays, nonsense poetry, songs by Blake, medieval fragments, and at one point two haunting lines from an Elegy of Donne’s printed by themselves, as if they were a whole poem:

 

“‘Nurse oh My Love is slain, I saw him go

Oer the white alps alone.’”