What attracted me was the anthologist’s audacity in titling his book: 100 Best Poems in the English Language (1952). In his introduction, Stephen Graham does little to impress us with his literary humility. His anthology is, he writes, “perhaps the only one of its kind, being exclusive, not inclusive.” The contents are arranged chronologically, from the ballad “Sir Patrick Spens” to Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The most often represented poets, with five poems each, are Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson and Browning. Three Americans are here – Poe, Whitman and Lanier (“The Marshes of Glynn”). No Dickinson, Robinson, Frost, Eliot or Stevens. Graham includes two poets I had never heard of -- Arthur O’Shaughnessy (“Ode”) and John Davidson (“The Last Journey”).
In other words, Graham’s anthology is
rather predictable – in 1952 and in 2025 -- and stuffed with warhorses and no previously undiscovered treasures. “Of course,” the editor admits, magnanimously,
“everyone is entitled to make his own selection of what he would consider the
hundred best poems in the language.” A nice choice for the volume’s epigraph,
unaccompanied by source, is spoken by Theseus in Act V, Scene 1 of A
Midsummer Night's Dream:
“The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from
earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy
nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
Best of all is the bookplate pasted to the
front endpaper:
“From the Library
of
Edgar Odell Lovett
First President
of the Rice Institute”
Lovett (1871-1957) served as president of Rice University from 1912 until his retirement in 1946. He was educated and employed as a mathematician but I have borrowed dozens of books from his personal library, now in the collection of Rice’s Fondren Library, and all were belles lettres – poetry, essays, fiction, literary biography. Such university presidents have long been extinct.
2 comments:
One of my daughters and her husband, Rice graduates, will love this post's conclusion.
Silly to declare that the anthology is exclusive rather than inclusive. The thickest book still excludes damn near everything.
One of my favorite poetry anthologies is 100 Poems by 100 Poets (1986), which is just what it says it is. Edited by Harold Pinter, Geoffrey Godbert, and Anthony Astbury, they cooked it up to pass the time while on a long train trip together. The choices are highly personal and sometimes eccentric, which makes it the kind of anthology I like. I discovered a lot of good things in it.
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