An Anthology of Modern Verse

chosen by A. Methuen, with an Introduction by Robert Lynd

This is a curiosity I picked up from my local Oxfam a while back. Unfortunately the online text is totally scannered, so there are idiocies like "rliythm" for "rhythm" - you just have to use your wits.

This "fine and catholic collection of modern verse" was first published May 12th 1921. It's dedicated to Thomas Hardy, O.M. Greatest of the Moderns. It went through seven editions in that first year. My copy is the thirtieth edition, published in 1940. I don't know how much longer it continued in publication.*

The poets are all from the British Isles. (Well, OK, Eliot's La Figlia Che Piange sneaks under the wire of date and residence.) Of the 92 names represented, more than half would be recognised today. How much of this familiarity was because of the persistence of the anthology, and how much did the anthology persist because of the popularity of the poets? The two must have fed off each other. At any rate, people were buying it.

I enjoy old anthologies not just for seeing reputations in the making, but for the snapshot - or rather, flickr stream - of history. There's a glimpse of people hardly read these days - eg Alice Meynell, JC Squire (I'm including them in the category "recognised") - consigned to a label "Catholic/Suffragette", "Georgian/fascist", but who had a way with words that merits a glance even if you don't share their politics or religion. And right next to Squire is James Stephens, and after him RL Stevenson.

The poets are presented in alphabetical order. No dates are given. It's rather touching to consider the publishers of each (Mr. John Lane, Mr. Wm. Heinemann, Sir Henry Newbolt, Mr. Basil Blackwell, Lord Desborough, Messrs Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd and so on). The compiler, Methuen, says nothing about his criteria for selection. His 1921 note remarks that "considerations of copyright have prevented the inclusion of one or two eminent writers", that "roughly, the pieces chosen are either the work of living poets, or with rare exceptions, poets who have died within the last fifteen years. It is hoped in any case that the spirit of the new poetry inspires this little book."

It was rather a shock to discover that Methuen's first name was Algernon, and that his surname was really Stedman. I'd love to know the story behind that. He didn't write the introduction though. Robert Lynd, who did, was a name new to me, but felt familiar:

Every child is a poet from the age at which he learns to beat a silver spoon on the table in numbers. He likes to make not only a noise, but a noise with something of the regularity of an echo. He coos with delight when he is taken on an elder's knee and is trotted up and down to the measure of "This is the way the ladies ride," with its steady advance of pace till the ultimate fury of the country clown's gallop. Later on, he himself trots gloriously in reins with bells that jingle in rhyme as he runs. His pleasure in swings, in sitting behind a horse, in travelling in a train, with its puff as regular as an uncle's watch and its wheels thudding out endless hexameters on the line, arise from the same delight in rhythm.

Well, that's a cosy middle class childhood, from back in the days when the middle class weren't forever pretending not to be, before they grew ashamed of themselves.

After suggesting that poetry can be distinguished from verse by its exercise of imagination, and from prose by its music, he makes the case for popular poetry:

Whichever may be the sense in which we use the word, there is a good defence of poetry as, not the possession of a select few, but as part of the general human inheritance. Poetry is natural to man: it is not a mere cult of abnormal or intellectual persons.

Hear, hear!

*Perhaps not for many years longer, as Lynd himself edited an anthology for Methuen's firm in 1939. It had considerable overlap with Methuen's own but as well as including Housman (curiously omitted from Methuen's), it edged into the modern with Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender, Dylan Thomas and others - and the fifteenth woman, Ruth Pitter.