by Paul Keegan
A quite different anthology might have been compiled according to dates of composition – a view from the workshop – but it is the publishing moment which has been attended to in these pages: the view from where the reader was standing. This story has not been reproduced with complete fidelity: the present anthology is intended to pass along and in some sense celebrate the main thoroughfares in the history of English verse. The rhythm of entry is therefore volume publication, when a poet gathered and ordered his or her work for a wider audience, and which allows for groupings of poems by one poet to be read together. The alternative would have been too atomized to be instructive or pleasurable.
The resulting sequence is nonetheless more oriented to poems as individuals, living in contingency – where the poem survives, in W. H. Auden’s words, ‘in the valley of its saying’ – than to individual poets in isolated succession. Thus poems by the same poet are often dispersed in these pages, and poems by different poets follow upon each other. They also face each other, and sometimes answer or act in disagreement with each other’s forms of knowing and proceeding. Even when these juxtapositions are not active, poems which appear at the same time testify to the truths of propinquity.
In a sense, The Penguin Book of English Verse is a thematic anthology, and its theme is chronology. Anthologies do no more than tell stories about the past and are themselves fictions, ideas of order. The sequence in the following pages makes no claim to documentary authority, because it excludes so much, because it is constructed with hindsight. The poetic landscape in, say, 1819, looked very different from what is now redeemed as significant from that year and the years surrounding. But the choice of poems in The Penguin Book has to some degree been determined by its overall structure, that of the anthology as chronicle: this kind of poem was being written at such a date; this particular poem might have been read alongside that particular poem in this year.
Put differently, The Penguin Book of English Verse asks what happens when chronology is not dislocated by the usual procedure of entering poets in author-shaped parcels by dates of birth. For the standard template does entail significant dislocation, not least in the case of poets with long careers. Samuel Johnson was born in 1709 and died in 1784, after which the reader is usually returned a notional seventy years to the next poet in succession, Thomas Gray (b. 1716). Even where an editor enters poets by the date of their earliest included poem, rather than by date of birth, chronology is puzzled: to place all of a poet’s work on the site of his or her earliest appearance is to untether the later poems from their proper milieu. Thus Johnson’s ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ was first published in 1749, and tends to be followed in anthologies by his other canonical poem, ‘On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet’, published over three decades later in 1783. After which we are usually returned in anthology-time to Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Church Yard’ (1751), and then on – or further backwards – to William Collins’s ‘Ode to Evening’ (1746).
In the case of posthumously published poets, or poets whose poems were read in manuscript long before they were printed, other misalignments occur. Many Renaissance authors-, from Sir Thomas Wyatt down to John Donne and beyond, circulated their verse almost entirely in manuscript, which means that their careers often occurred somewhat earlier than is apparent from publication dates. Donne has come to be seen as a later poet than he in fact was: the early elegies and satires were being read in the 1590s, and the bulk of his poetry was in circulation by the 1620s, though it was only printed in 1633.
Sometimes chronology tells a more delayed story than the one we have been accustomed to hearing. In the case of Andrew Marvell, whose poems were printed in 1681, three years after his death, there is less evidence for manuscript circulation, even for the great ‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwel’s Return from Ireland’, written perhaps thirty years earlier. Here an actual date of publication gains significance, and Marvell can be read now as he was read then: a Restoration poet as much as a metaphysical lyricist. Contemporaries are those who wrote at the same time – but also those who were first read at the same time. Traditionally fixed as stars of the one poetic school, Donne and Marvell are set adrift on the floes of chronology.
The notion of poetic periods with easy – and therefore strict – demarcations has tended to be reinforced by the activity of anthologies which present poets in isolation, removed from stylistic conflict (and from contemporary realities to which such conflict responds and corresponds). The poet-by-poet model presents an apostolic succession of major figures, with brief interludes in which minor figures, one-poem poets and Anon are temporarily lodged, as in the passageways between old masters in a gallery.
A chronicle-ordering complicates the texture of periods by making each more anomalously populous, its edges more blurred; and restores to these fixities the circulating energy of what Alexander Pope termed ‘poetry’s mutual commerce’. Major poetry is reconnected to a milieu, and minor figures become less marginal to a sequence whose unit is the individual poem. It is moreover significantly easier to speak of minor poets than of minor poems; one effect of a poem-by-poem ordering is to encourage a frame of mind which judges the poet by the poem, rather than vice versa.
Two kinds of poem which have no particular place to go – popular ballads and poems by Anon (by which is usually meant folk-poetry) – have further tended to embarrass or be embarrassed by the strong lines of the poet-by-poet anthology. Anon tends to be entered all together in one or two places, and the ballads together in another, making each seem as if produced by a single author. Because of the constraints upon the kinds of poem commonly admitted to each category, the resulting sequences do seem to share a unity of intention, as of a collective poet with a putative floruit in the deep past of oral tradition. The Penguin Book of English Verse enters Anon in many different places, to reflect print history, so that he or she is allowed to be many poets without names. As to ballads, instead of viewing the ballad tradition as an autonomous story of oral transmission, I have followed the literary history of the popular ballad – its several points of entry into the print canon. The result is that ballads appear rather later than is usual in such anthologies, and take their place as an informing aspect of eighteenth-century and Romantic reading and writing.
The intention of the present anthology has been to restore poems to their places in the history of reading. This has led to the decision not to modernize spelling and punctuation. Poems are written and published (though textually this often means quite different things) into a given state of the language – which modernization elides, since it takes for granted that current meanings can be mapped exactly on to the older shapes of words, and it conceals rhymes or wordplay. The progress of an anthology which retains these older forms allows the printed voice of the poetry (acoustic, verbal and visual) to be seen and heard, and allows readers to follow the common enterprise of the language evolving over seven hundred years.
That enterprise is the subject of The Penguin Book of English Verse, whence its focus upon the poetry produced in the language common to these islands: English – in its regional and national forms – and their cognate, Scots. No attempt has been made to include anglophone poetry from beyond this archipelago – no American verse, no Commonwealth verse – for reasons of space, and to maintain the pressure upon a chronology defined in local rather than global ways. In the twentieth century there have been terminal pressures upon the idea of the local, only the echo of which can be heard in these pages. With the significant exception that Americans T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (the English Pound, before his departure for Paris in 1920) are tutelary presences, and that Sylvia Plath is also present. These poets are part of the story, and their work first entered that story before it altered the wider picture.
Some non-residents have been included: news from a foreign country, in the form of translations from classical and European languages. Ezra Pound was the first to restate the Elizabethan intuition that ‘a great age of literature is perhaps a
lways a great age of translations, or follows it’. Some verse translations – from the Bible notably – have used a form of prose as their medium, and the borders of poetry and prose are occasionally crossed elsewhere in these pages – whether in Thomas Traherne’s biblical prose inspirations, or in the (few) attempts to harness the European precedent of the prose poem to vernacular ends.
The New Penguin Book retains the titling of its predecessor, edited by John Hayward: The Penguin Book of English Verse. Verse, not Poetry, since ‘verse’ may still be thought of as the more inclusive term (and not only because we speak of light verse and comic verse) – more various in its occasions, and with a hint of serving some of the poetries excluded by Poetry. Or as Auden said, addressing the Workers’ Educational Association in 1936: ‘Really, to appreciate archdeacons, you need to know some barmaids, and vice versa. The same is true of poetry.’
John Hayward’s Penguin Book appeared over forty years ago. Since then our sense of the past has itself been altered by an extension of our present. Hayward began with Tottel’s Miscellany in the 1550s and ended in the 1930s. The present Penguin Book extends the frame on either side, beginning with the high medieval legacy. But it makes no claim inclusively to represent the latter decades of the Twentieth Century. Although ending with poems from the early 1990s, no poet born after the outset of the 1950s has been included – in the interests of giving adequate representation to poets of the mid century and after, rather than a thin coverage of the generation which followed, who contribute to a chronology still in the making.
A Note on the Texts
The spelling and punctuation of the texts is reproduced as it appears in the printed sources, but older typographical conventions, such as the alternative forms of i and j, u and v found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printing, have been regularized. Capitalization of titles has been standardized.
Poems usually enter the sequence by their date of earliest publication. Where this is not the case, the publication date is occasionally offered at the end of a poem (in brackets), so that a reader can place it mentally at a different point of entry, or at least be aware of complication. Where publication occurred significantly later than composition, I have given the date of composition (cited as ‘written’). When a poem was first published posthumously, it is entered at its date of publication if the original audience was still intact (many poets’ works – their ‘Remaines’ – were collected at or shortly after their deaths as an act of pietas). There are varieties of post-humousness, willing and unwilling – intermediate states between what Donne called the ‘presse’ on the one hand and the ‘fire’ on the other. Poems by Shelley, Clare, Gurney and others were withheld due to circumstances beyond their control, such as censorship or rejection. Where post-humousness was protracted, I have entered a poem in the company of other poems by the same poet, or by date of composition.
In the case of circulation prior to print publication, I have entered poems by approximate dates of appearance. In many cases, however, I have held to a print date, where information is uncertain or where appearance in print is a significant event (Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1609) – and because Gutenberg is the centre of gravity for this anthology. In the case of medieval verse, where publication often took place only centuries later, I have ordered poems as in a miscellany, by approximate dates between 1300 and 1400.
Excerpts. Some short long poems – Keats’s ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, or Burns’s ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ – appear in their entirety. But excerpts are inevitable for the leviathans of the language (such as Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Wordsworth’s The Prelude), and for much else. I have sometimes excerpted the openings, for as Keats remarked of Paradise Lost, ‘there is always a great charm in the openings of great Poems’; on occasion excerpts have been chosen with an eye to a specimen, in the chronicling spirit of the anthology as a whole, rather than seeking out essences. (William Hazlitt’s rebuke to the anthologist as pearl-diver still stands: ‘those parts of any author which are most liable to be stitched in worsted, and framed and glazed, are not by any means always the best’.)
Many long poems are processes with several publication dates, rather than products entering the language at a single juncture, and the two excerpts from ’The Faerie Queene, or from Coleridge’s ‘The Ancient Mariner’, reflect this aspect. Many short poems are also processes in time, subject to revision. I have often chosen a later text of a poem than the version which appeared on first publication, but have indicated important cases by appending two publication dates (Coleridge’s ‘The Eolian Harp’: 1796, 1817). In other words, the texts reproduced in these pages did not necessarily take this form on their first appearance, but the gains in offering a later text have sometimes outweighed the claim to offer earliest texts on the grounds of strict accountability to the story of inception and reception. Poets are entitled to last thoughts, even if at times this has meant placing these on the site of first thoughts.
Where there is a group of poems by the same author from a particular collection (George Herbert’s The Temple 1633) – or in cases where poems by different authors are taken from the same source (Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes 1557) – the beginning and ending of the group has been indicated by the device of a printer’s leaf (§).
Medieval verse has been glossed, and poems in Scots are glossed throughout; otherwise there is no annotation. Poem titles are authorial, though this is not always easy to determine. Until the early seventeenth century short poems were usually untitled, and such titles as they bore were often supplied by editors or booksellers, or by the owners of the manuscripts in which they appear. I have not reproduced such titles (or given first-line titles to poems without titles), though on occasion I have given a familiar or traditionally ascribed title in square brackets. Editorial titles for excerpts also appear in square brackets. Where the title of a poem does not indicate that it is a translation this information has been indicated editorially.
Songs from plays, and poems from novels and other prose works (Sir Walter Scott, Lewis Carroll) have been included, but often I have given a frame: an immediately preceding speech, a stage direction, the identity of a speaker – to indicate that the item is independent but incomplete, abstracted from a context which can only be gestured towards – as is the case all ways round with anthologies.
[Rawlinson Lyrics] 1300–1350
ANONYMOUS
Ich am of Irlande
And of the holy lande
Of Irlande.
Gode sire, pray Ich thee
5
For of saynte charité
Come and daunce with me
In Irlande.
ANONYMOUS
Maiden in the more lay,
In the more lay,
Sevenightë fullë and a –
Sevenightë fulle and a –
5
Maiden in the morë lay,
In the morë lay,
Sevenightë fullë and a day.
Well was hirë mete,
What was hirë mete?
10
The primerole and the –
The primerole and the –
Well was hirë mete,
What was hirë mete?
The primerole and the violet.
Well was hirë dring,
What was hirë dring?
The coldë water of the –
The coldë water of the –
Well was hirë dring,
20
What was hirë dring?
The coldë water of the wellë-spring.
Well was hirë bour,
What was hirë bour?
The redë rose and the –
25
The redë rose and the –
Well was hirë bour,
What was hirë bour?
The redë rose and the lilie flour.
ANONYMOUS
Al night by the rosë, rosë,
Al night bi the rose I lay,
Dorst Ich nought the rosë stele
,
And yet I bar the flour away.
(1907)
[Harley Lyrics]
ANONYMOUS
Bitwenë March and Avëril
When spray biginneth to springe,
The litel foul hath hirë wil
On hyrë lede to synge.
5
Ich live in love-longinge
For semeliest of allë thynge,
She may me blissë bringe,
Ich am in hire baundoun.
An hendy hap Ichave y-hent,
10
Ichot from hevene it is me sent,
From allë wommen my love is lent
And light on Alysoun.
On hew hire her is fair ynogh,
Hire browës broune, hire eyen blake,
