'Personal Affections'

Only recently have I learned of the entrenched snobbery in certain quarters against anthologies. It seems to be rooted in the conviction that readers ought to read writers in their original volumes, not someone’s curated selection, or something like that. In common with most snobberies, it seems arbitrary and silly. 

Much of my education started with the poetry anthologies edited by Oscar Williams (1899-1964). With a few exceptions – Shakespeare, Whitman, Kipling, et al. -- that’s where I first encountered the English-language poets, major and minor. I specifically remember reading Karl Shapiro’s “Scyros” in one of Williams’ collections while standing in James Books on Ridge Road in Parma, Ohio. I bought the Washington Square Press paperback.    

 

Good anthologies are literary smorgasbords, an opportunity to sample many writers and develop taste. How else is a young reader to make up his mind, learn the tradition and sharpen his critical judgments?  He’ll encounter plenty of dreck, of course, but that’s inevitable. Bad poetry helps us identify and appreciate the good stuff.

 

T.S. Eliot devoted much of “What Is Minor Poetry?”, published in The Sewanee Review in 1946, to the subject of anthologies. The essay is collected in Vol. 6: The War Years, 1940-1946 in the eight-volume Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition (2021). I’ve been reacquainting myself with Eliot’s work, poetry and prose. He was an early and influential favorite, and is more than merely “democratic” when it comes to anthologies. He is clever and insightful and perhaps remembers his own early experience with them:

 

“The value of anthologies in introducing us to the work of the greatest poets, is soon over; and we do not go on reading anthologies for the selections from these poets, though they have to be there. The anthology also helps us to find out, whether there are not some lesser poets of whose work we should like to know more—poets who do not figure so conspicuously in any history of literature, who may not have influenced the course of literature, poets whose work is not necessary for any abstract scheme of literary education, but who may have a strong personal appeal to certain readers.”

 

The subsequent passage sounds deeply personal: “Indeed, I should be inclined to doubt the genuineness of the love of poetry of any reader who did not have one or more of these personal affections for the work of some poet of no great historical importance: I should suspect that the person who only liked the poets whom the history books agree to be the most important, was probably no more than a conscientious student, bringing very little of himself to his appreciations.”

 

I find Eliot’s sentiments here rather touching, and they come close to describing the evolution of a lifelong devotion to literature. I’m tempted to name some of the “minor” poets whom I often read again, though I’m afraid that might come off as condescending.