The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry

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The school anthologists of the past, knowing their young pupils’ limits, offered many “accessible” poems, usually narrative ones, purveying simple moral instruction in patriotism or religious feeling. But it was assumed that adult readers of poetry could progress beyond “Hiawatha” or “Barbara Frietchie” to works attaining varieties of diction, overlapping intellectual structures, and complex moral reference. Jewel stairs' grievance ; River-merchants' wife : a letter ; In a station of the metro ; Hugh Selwyn Mauberley ; Canto LXXXI : (Libretto: "Yet/Ere the season died a-cold") / Ezra Pound How did they start? Afresh. How did they do things? Differently. What did they embrace? The new. Even our own uncertain present is evoked with platitudes: we are Dear John, dear Coltrane ; Last affair : Bessie's blues song ; Grandfather ; Nightmare begins responsibility / M

Speculation runs wild. Some take a fairly charitable view: one reviewer sees the exclusion of Plath and Ginsberg as proof that Dove “is her own woman,” bravely going off in her own direction. Facebook has lit up with chatter on the anthology, very little of it positive, at least from what I've seen. It’s been noted that many of the excluded poets publish under HarperCollins imprints, and one source claims that HarperCollins wanted some very steep reprint fees. If this is the case, one wonders whether it might have been a deliberate attempt to torpedo a rival press’ anthology. Some of these issues are touched on in Dove’s introduction, in which she complains about permissions fees. One wonders if this can be the whole story: Penguin is by no means an under-capitalized venture, and people at the press must have known that glaring exclusions like this would seriously hurt the academic market for the book. But what else could explain the exclusions?

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Does anyone have a phone number for the producers of the World's Toughest Job? Because we'd like to petition that they add "poetry anthologist" to their roster of underwater welders, rodeo clowns, ultimate fighters, and pyrotechnicians. Okay, it's true that you won't lose any limbs compiling the "best" verse of the last 100 years, but the occupational hazards are nevertheless intense. And that’s one of the problems. For students, anthologies are generally heavy, cumbersome, and expensive. Penguin, continuing its tradition of offering solid literary value for the money, has opted for good and cheap, if not comprehensive. And handsome. The book is well made and nice to look at. Of course, this question of wheat vs. chaff -- of poet vs. sociological specimen -- is never a neutral one. Jeremy Bass, weighing in on the Anthology for The Nation, opens with a quote from Toni Morrison's 1988 lecture " Unspeakable Things Unspoken": "Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense." Bass commends Dove for her "wholly subjective" and "inarguably necessary" selections that bust open the canon to needed newcomers: In nineteenth-century America, poetry was an integral part of everyday life. The two volumes of The Library of America’sAmerican Poetry: The Nineteenth Centuryreveal the vigor and diversity of a tradition embracing solitary visionaries and congenial storytellers, humorists and dissidents, songwriters and philosophers. These extraordinary anthologies reassess America’s poetic legacy with a comprehensive sweep that no previous anthology has attempted. With regard to things "beyond the editor's wishes": it is my belief that, when one allows oneself to be listed as the editor of a work, one accepts responsibility for the contents of that work. Good intentions, as we all know, pave the way to a very specific destination. And I hope you'd agree that we must judge the work we are given, not the work the author or editor wishes we were given.

Customer reviews

Effort at speech between two people ; Then I saw what the calling was ; Poem as mask / Muriel Rukeyser When you write "This is less an insult and as a commentary" I do not know what you mean, because the pronoun referent is unclear and the sentence poorly formed. If you mean you do not wish to insult me, I'm glad of the gesture, but I have to say I find it, to use one of your words, disingenuous.

One wants the contemporary poets of Dove’s collection to ask more of their language, to embody more planes of existence, to dip and pivot like the seagull. There are such poets living now, but they are either absent or in short supply in this book. I thought it was amusing to see how you so readily misunderstood Amy and rushed to the question of whether she was comfortable with leaving out white poets compensated for including poets of color! I compare this with your rush to review the anthology and reported a major error by saying that Dove omitted Hass and Merwin which I find inexcusable since the book has an index! In the case of Amy, she was posing an important, general question: even if Plath or Ginsburg were excluded, that is not a good reason to not publish the anthology since (1) these poets are in plenty anthologies while many of the poets of color are not (2) anthologies are a matter of taste so Dove's 20th century has the right to look different from your 20th century and (3) your review was all about what was left out when this could have been a good opportunity to inform your readers about quality poets that were included this time around that had been so often left out in previous anthologies, like a Melvin Tolson.I’ve done just enough editing myself to know that standing up and saying you’re editing an anthology is a bit like standing up and saying you’re a target—and the larger the scope of the anthology, the larger the target. It’s worse, too, when you’re editing a book that includes living poets: at this point you might as well consider yourself a walking bull's eye, and be prepared to suffer the slings and arrows of outraged poets everywhere. In any anthology, there will be grounds for disagreement: the poor editor has a limited amount of space, and in the end will find that he or she has to select one poet out of dozens with valid claims for inclusion. Dove not only decides for many, rather than few, poets. She also decides (except in certain obligatory moments) for the more “accessible” portions of modern lyric. Not to be “accessible” is now to be chastised. Perhaps Dove’s two years as poet laureate helped foster the impression that poetry should be written in “plain American that cats and dogs can read” (Moore, satirizing English views of America). But a poem can communicate while it is still imperfectly understood (said Coleridge), and Dove trusts her readers less than she might.