Tag Archives: 20th century

Review: ‘The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse’, ed. Philip Larkin

4 Replies

This anthology edited by Philip Larkin (which, despite its title, only goes up to the early 1970s) is the most comprehensive, diverse and inspiring collection of formal and semi-formal poetry that I have ever come across. It has, naturally, some free verse… but even that is entertaining in this selection.

The book has no one born before 1840 (Blunt and Hardy), no Matthew Arnold, no Gerard Manley Hopkins (died 1889), so there are almost no Thee’s and Thou’s… except from Robert Bridges.

It has no one born after 1946 (Brian Patten); poets of today are not in this book.

Larkin chose to exclude writers not “born in these islands (or resident here for an appreciable time)”, which lets him include Kipling and Eliot as well as any Scots, Welsh or Irish that he chooses, but cuts out E.E. Cummings, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Frost… And Larkin makes no explanation or apology for including Derek Walcott who, born in St. Lucia, lived his life between the Caribbean and the US.

So the anthology is not as complete as could be hoped; but, with 584 poems by 207 poets in 625 pages, it is enormously wide-ranging and full of not just the best of Yeats, Eliot, Auden, but also unexpected treasures by authors barely known today. Here is T.E. Hulme’s ‘The Embankment’, subtitled ‘(The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night)’:

Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

And in completely contrasting mood, here is ‘An Epitaph’ by Colin Ellis:

He worshipped at the altar of Romance
(Tried to seduce a woman half his age)
And dared to stake his fortune on a chance
(Gambled away his children’s heritage).

He valued only what the world held cheap
(Refused to work, from laziness and pride):
Dreams were his refuge and he welcomed sleep
(He failed at business, took to drink and died).

All types of (“English”) 20th century verse are in the anthology. It is the most wonderful, wonderful read.

Review: “Selected Poems” by W.H. Auden

6 Replies

Auden

The best of Auden’s poems are so many, so varied, so technically accomplished and so witty that he stands with the greatest poets of the 20th century. My list of favourites includes:

“O where are you going?” said reader to rider
O what is that sound that so thrills the ear
A shilling life will give you all the facts
Look, stranger, at this island now
Miss Gee
As I walked out one evening
In Time of War
Musee des Beaux Arts
In Memory of W.B. Yeats
Law, say the gardeners, is the sun

and what many consider the greatest love-poem of the last 100 years:
“Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm”.
There is a universality about Auden’s depiction of relationships, an indeterminate quality that allows his thoughts to be applied to all people. This is in keeping with the fact that he was gay, and writing in a time when homosexuality was illegal. It provides an unexpected strength for his verse.

And yet, and yet… all of those poems listed above were written before he turned 33. He lived to age 66, writing longer and longer works, moving further and further away from traditional verse, and with less of the memorable genius of his youth.

It is therefore somewhat depressing to read these “Selected Poems” because they are set out chronologically, and the writing gets less interesting the further you read. Halfway through the book you run into the poem sequence “The Sea and the Mirror – a commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest”, which includes 25 pages of prose crammed with dense imagery and argument. Apparently Auden preferred this prose section, “Caliban to the Audience”, over all his other work. This preference was expressed at the time that he was rewriting the excellent poems of his youth to reflect his newer American, Christian, self-important academic personality. I found it unreadable.

The first edition of “Selected Poems” (selected and edited by Edward Mendelson) contains 100 poems. A more recent edition adds another 20 poems, “broadening its focus to better reflect the enormous wealth of form, rhetoric, tone, and content in Auden’s work. Newly included are such favorites as “Funeral Blues” and other works that represent Auden’s lighter, comic side”.

Unfortunately I only have the 100-poem version. If you buy a copy of this book, make sure it has the 120 poems!