'Better Bread Than Is Made of Wheat'

Sometimes disparate things almost announce their covert similarities and linkages, in a way Aristotle would have understood, and it makes good sense to combine them. I was looking for something in The Poet’s Tongue, the anthology compiled by W.H. Auden and the schoolmaster John Garrett, published in 1935. It’s a little eccentric. The poems are printed anonymously (until the index) and arranged alphabetically. My first thought was that the book is designed for young, inexperienced readers, not yet deeply read in the English poetic tradition, who can encounter the poems without the prejudice of chronology or name recognition. The focus is on the text. Now I think the anthologists’ arrangement is a gift to veteran readers who can read Marvell or Tennyson outside the classroom and shed or retain long-held biases. It recalls Downbeat magazine’s long-running feature, “Blindfold Test.” 

Next, I got curious about the anthology’s critical reception ninety years ago and discovered it had been reviewed by one of my favorite critics, the poet Louise Bogan, in the April 1936 issue of Poetry. In “Poetry’s Genuine Fare,” Bogan begins by comparing the Auden/Garrett collection with Francis Palgrave’s famous Golden Treasury (1875):

 

“Where Palgrave was able to present selected poems in a straightforward chronological manner, as though the last thing to consider was the idea that readers might or might not be prepared for it, Auden and Garrett’s task involves devices: the ground must be cleared and then, as it were, disguised, in order that, in our day, poetry may be  approached, by youth, without scorn or fear.”

 

Bogan applauds the inclusion of “songs fresh from the tongue of simple people, songs which first saw light printed on broadsheets, songs from the primer and the nursery, from the music-hall, from the hymnal and the psalter.” She applauds the adjoining of, say, a ballad preceding Dryden’s Song for St. Cecilia's Day and followed by a nursery rhyme. By reading the poems-as-poems, students can develop their taste and critical sense. That leaves plenty of room for future literary history and scholarship. Late in her review Bogan cites a passage identified only as having been written by George Saintsbury (1845-1933):

 

“It would be a very great pity if there were ever wanting critical appreciation which, while relishing things more exquisite, and understanding things more esoteric, can still taste and savor the simple genuine fare of poetry. . . . There are few wiser proverbs than that which cautions us against demanding ‘better bread than is made of wheat.’”

 

The quotation was new to me.A little hunting showed Bogan had drawn it from Saintsbury’s A History of Nineteenth Century Literature 1780-1895 (1896). “This is Saintsbury speaking in an eminently sane manner,” she writes, “words which should be taken to heart in this era of fashions, proselytizing and fear, when poetry might well bloat in the mephitic vapors bred from dismal insistence on ‘revolutions of the word,’ or wither into the disguised hymnals of propaganda.” His thoughts remain pertinent. They are drawn from the section in his book Saintsbury devotes to the historian and poet Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59). He describes Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) as “an honest household loaf that no healthy palate will reject.” Bogan concludes her review:

“Auden and Garrett have endeavored to show that poetry would exist if not only the linotype, but also the pen, had never been invented, and that it rises from the throat of whatever class, in whatever century. They have brought our attention back to the voice speaking in a landscape where trees bear laurel at the same time that fields grow bread.”