Oxford Book of American Poetry by David Lehman, John Brehm (Editor)

• Interviews & Essays

Interviews & Essays

The Making of a New Classic
by David Lehman

This new edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry is the first since Richard Ellmann edited The New Oxford Book of American Verse in 1976. Twenty-six years earlier F. O. Matthiessen had assembled and introduced the previous edition under the title The Oxford Book of American Verse. It is an honor to join the company of two such accomplished scholars and skillful anthologists. Matthiessen (1902-1950), a renowned Harvard professor, wrote an early book expounding T. S. Eliot's achievement. He also wrote American Renaissance (1941), a classic study of five nineteenth-century writers. Ellmann, who died in 1987 at the age of sixty-nine, held a titled professorship at Oxford and later at Emory University. He was justly acclaimed for his biographies of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde. Less well-known are Ellmann's excellent translations of Henri Michaux, which introduced American poets to this hero of the French prose poem. Though my task in creating this book necessarily involves overhauling Matthiessen's and Ellmann's, I mean to build on both. It is my good fortune to inherit their work, which has served my own as scaffolding or source.

The Oxford Book of American Poetry is a comprehensive, one-volume anthology of American poetry from its seventeenth-century origins to the present. The words canon and canonical acquired new layers of connotation during the culture wars of the past quarter-century, but we shouldn't shy away from such terms when they fit the case, as they do here. The goal of this volume is to establish a canon wider and more inclusive than those that formerly prevailed but to do so on grounds that are fundamentally literary and artistic in nature. Not one selection was dictated by a political imperative. Matthiessen in 1950 picked fifty-one poets. Ellmann's anthology contained seventy-eight. There are two hundred and twelve in this volume.

The discrepancy between the seventy-eight poets in Ellmann and the 212 included here is not attributable to the difference in cut-off years alone. Naturally, I needed and wanted to include poets born since 1934, the birth year of Ellmann's youngest poet, but I was determined also to rescue many who had been eligible but were overlooked in previous editions. To make room for the new you need to subject the old to stringent reevaluation, and so I needed not only to reconsider Ellmann's selections but to ask whether such major figures as Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, Williams, Moore, and Bishop can be better represented than they were formerly. It is especially vital to reassess the selection of poets who were barely hitting mid-career when Ellmann made his selections - poets of the magnitude of A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, and James Merrill. In Matthiessen the youngest poet was born in 1917; in Ellmann, 1934. Needing to advance the cut-off date, I settled on 1950, which virtually replicates the previous interval and has the additional advantage of being both the exact midpoint of the twentieth century and the year Matthiessen's selection was published. Making an anthology involves making a lot of lists -- beginning with a list of the poets too young to be considered by Ellmann in 1976. Thirty years have gone by since then, and I can hear America clamoring. Scores of fine poets born since 1950 are rapping on the doors, pressing their case for admission. It would be tricky enough to accommodate the impatient newcomers in any circumstances. But what makes things infinitely more complicated is that the list of outstanding poets who were eligible in 1976 but not included may be even longer. Missing from Ellmann is W. H. Auden. (Matthiessen had included him in 1950, but Ellmann - in the single parenthetical sentence he devotes to the question - explains that he considered Auden "English to the bone.") The omission of Gertrude Stein goes unexplained, but then it would doubtlessly astonish both Matthiessen and Ellmann to learn that this relentlessly abstract writer should have the continuing and growing influence on American poetry that she has. In Ellmann you won't find any evidence of the Objectivist movement (Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Lorine Niedecker). Absent, too, are New York School stalwarts Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler and eminent San Franciscans Kenneth Rexroth and Jack Spicer. Not in Ellmann, James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Angelina Weld Grimke, Jean Toomer, Melvin Tolson, Sterling Brown, Claude McKay, and Robert Hayden, African-American poets who have become better known in recent years. Nor in Ellmann such smart-set poets of wit and satire as Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash, who lacked gravitas at a time when that quality was deemed essential, as though real poetry (as opposed to light verse) had to be as deadly as a press conference with a presidential hopeful. Some of the poets overlooked in 1976 were once celebrated, later deprecated (Amy Lowell); some died young and obscure (Samuel Greenberg, Joan Murray); some were once in fashion but fell into disregard (H. Phelps Putnam, Leonie Adams); some. Others may have seemed too eccentric (John Wheelwright, William Bronk) or were underrated until somebody else made it his or her business to champion them (Weldon Kees) or were better known for their work in a different field (as were Lincoln Kirstein, the director of the New York City Ballet, and Edwin Denby, the foremost dance critic of his time). Some were overshadowed by a great contemporary, as Josephine Miles (born 1911) and May Swenson (b. 1913) were overshadowed by Elizabeth Bishop (b. 1911).

Some may have been resented and therefore overlooked because of their perceived editorial power (Howard Moss, poetry editor of The New Yorker); some were just plain overlooked (Donald Justice, John Hollander). Yet others never got the attention they deserved (Ruth Herschberger, Joseph Ceravolo) or were acknowledged or dismissed for reasons having little to do with their actual writing (Laura Riding, who was Robert Graves's companion and collaborator and who later renounced poetry and became a first-class crank). What many of these poets have in common is that they stood outside the prevailing tradition, the mainline of American poetry as the academic literary establishment conceived it in 1976. It was not very difficult to leave them out.

Donald Hall, in a critique of Ellmann's anthology, writes that the New Oxford Book of American Verse "gives us poetry by the Star System." There is a less prejudicial way of putting this. Matthiessen in his introduction to the 1950 edition says pithily that his first rule was "fewer poets, with more space for each."

Matthiessen -- and Ellmann as well -- aimed for amplitude; they wanted to present the best poets in full measure, at the expense of "several delicately accomplished lyric poets whose continuing life is in a few anthology pieces" (Matthiessen). In Ellmann, the major figures get star treatment -- thirty-nine pages for John Greenleaf Whittier, including all of "Snow-Bound," twenty-nine pages for William Carlos Williams, twenty-eight for Robert Frost, twenty-three for Marianne Moore -- while putatively minor figures such as Stephen Crane and Trumbull Stickney are lucky to get two pages apiece.

To the extent that hierarchy is an inescapable ordering principle, some of this is inevitable. Walt Whitman is and should be the gold standard in number of pages allotted, Emily Dickinson in number of poems included. They are our poetic grandparents, these two, and no two poets could seem less alike: a robust and expansive bard who wrote in long lines and proposed his poems as an embodiment of a vision of American democracy, on the one hand, and a reclusive shut-in who wrote in short breath utterances broken by dashes and made her interior life a cosmos. People who habitually divide everything in two may contend that all poets make themselves in the image of one or the other of these two great predecessors. And it is likely that the leading poets of our time have all read certain poets in common -- Eliot, Pound, Moore, Stevens, Williams, Frost, Bishop, Ashbery -- whom we must therefore take pains to represent at length. Nevertheless there are alternatives to the star system. "We used to make anthologies not of poets but of poems," Donald Hall says, and it is possible to balance the claims of major figures with the case for great poems by poets considered peripheral. That is the path I have elected to follow. As comprehensiveness tends to vary inversely with focus, the gain in variety and ecumenicism may not come cost-free, but then the making of an anthology is neither an exact science nor a pure art but a vision projected and sustained to fulfillment.