'Having Actually Pleased Intelligent Children'

When leafing through a poetry anthology, I tend to go first to the poems and poets previously unknown to me. Sometimes my ignorance is retroactively rewarded: “These poems are awful.” Only occasionally do I discover a cloistered gem. 

Coventry Patmore (1823-96) I know more for his unlikely name than his work. In 1884 he published The Children’s Garland from the Best Poets, and many of the contents are new to me. The book went through twelve editions by 1895. The Fondren Library copy I borrowed is inscribed “Archibald Dickson—1888” – a name that sounds like a character in one of E.A. Robinson’s poems. Patmore writes rather audaciously in his preface:

 

“This volume will, I hope, be found to contain nearly all the genuine poetry in our language fitted to please children,—of and from the age at which they have usually learned to read,—in common with grown people. A collection on this plan has, I believe, never before been made, although the value of the principle seems clear.”

 

Clearly, the Victorians set high expectations for their children (Patmore had six). The poet with the most poems anthologized – sixteen -- is Wordsworth. Cowper gets ten; Southey, seven; Tennyson, six. The overall selection is slanted toward the nineteenth century. Surprisingly, Swift’s “Baucis and Philemon” is judged wholesome and thus is included, though not “The Lady’s Dressing Room.” Among the Tennyson poems chosen by Patmore is “The Brook,” which I hadn’t read in many years. The opening line, “I come from haunts of coot and hern,” brought back to mind James Thurber’s cartoon. Patmore in his preface describes his criteria of inclusion:

“The test applied, in every instance, in the work of selection, has been that of having actually pleased intelligent children; and my object has been to make a book which shall be to them no more nor less than a book of equally good poetry is to intelligent grown persons. The charm of such a book to the latter class of readers is rather increased than lessened by the surmised existence in it of an unknown amount of power, meaning and beauty, beyond that which is at once to be seen; and children will not like this volume the less because, though containing little or nothing which will not at once please and amuse them, it also contains much, the full excellence of which they may not as yet be able to understand.”

That final line would seem to echo T.S. Eliot’s observation in his 1929 essay “Dante”: “[G]enuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”