How Anthologies Wage War Over Poetic Reputation

David Lehman, the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006), chose 210 poets for that volume — nearly triple the 78 assembled by Richard Ellmann in The New Oxford Book of American Verse (1976), only thirty years earlier. In a wide-ranging essay on poets and reputations, Lehman argues that literary standing is a battlefield whose outcomes are never guaranteed while the fight is live.

"Only in retrospect is history inevitable," Lehman writes. Poets, like generals, compete "for mortal stakes, though usually they do so without fisticuffs." The competition concerns merit — or the perception of it — and the vagaries of reputation. Poets, in his formulation, gamble on posterity's verdict, writing for a fame they will never witness.

How fickle is literary reputation?

Extremely, according to Lehman's examples. Emily Dickinson, who dismissed publication as the "Auction / Of the Mind of Man," died unknown. Emma Lazarus never lived to see her sonnet "The New Colossus" articulate the meaning of the Statue of Liberty. Edmund Wilson, aged seventy-one, grew worried upon receiving an honor, because "an accepted reputation can be derived from no real merit whatsoever."

Lehman adopts the stock market as the standing metaphor for these gyrations. Shares of Shelley climbed through most of the nineteenth century, then crashed in the 1920s when T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis issued effective "sell" recommendations on the English Romantics. American English departments simultaneously took strong positions in the seventeenth-century metaphysicals — Donne, Marvell, Herbert. The 1960s brought the counterrevolution: at Yale, the Romantics returned, while youth backed the anti-establishmentarians — Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, Frank O'Hara and the New York School — against establishment figures like Robert Lowell and John Berryman.

The decades that followed, Lehman argues, saw "a galloping skepticism" contest the whole idea of a canon. The consequences cut both ways: a broader appreciation of American popular culture, but also "a general lowering of standards, taste, and discourse," grade inflation, declining civility, and growing historical ignorance. One gain was real — the recognition that a narrow single line of descent from Emerson and Whitman to Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery is no longer viable. Citing Whitman's "Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then I contradict myself," Lehman notes that the old forced choice between Eliot and William Carlos Williams has dissolved.

What does an anthology editor actually decide?

Lehman's Oxford volume runs 1,100 pages, as big as an old one-volume encyclopedia, yet it cannot include everyone. His rules and rulings included:

• Whitman gets the most pages; Dickinson the greatest number of poems.
• The no-translations rule was waived for Pound's "River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" and John Hollander's rendering of "The Bird" from the Yiddish of Moishe Leib Halpern.
• Both versions of Marianne Moore's "Poetry" appear — the original 1919 text and the radically truncated 1967 one.
• T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden both stay in; Ellmann had cut Auden on the grounds that he "seems English to the bone."
• Edna St. Vincent Millay, "the most brilliant of our sonneteers," was omitted by Ellmann entirely — an error Lehman corrects, printing "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why."

Lehman also faults F. O. Matthiessen's 1950 Oxford Book of American Verse, whose "not too many sonnets" rule, he suspects, blinded it to Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" and Weldon Kees's "For My Daughter." He prefers the 1855 Song of Myself to the 1892 deathbed version Ellmann chose.

The revived and recovered include Millay, Amy Lowell, James Weldon Johnson, Angelina Weld Grimké, Charles Bukowski, Edwin Denby, Emma Lazarus, Joan Murray, David Schubert, Samuel Greenberg, John Wheelwright, Elinor Wylie and Howard Moss.

Which forgotten poets deserve revival?

Discoveries and revivals, Lehman writes, may be the single most exciting part of anthology-making. He champions Josephine Miles (1911–1985), a Berkeley professor for thirty-eight years whose students included A. R. Ammons and Jack Spicer, and whom he calls "an authentic heir of Emily Dickinson" — even though Kenneth Rexroth dismissed her early poems as "small, very neat holes cut in the paper." He reprints her "Ride" and "Reason" (both 1955). "I like the idea of speech—not images, not ideas, not music, but people talking as the material from which poetry is made," Miles said of "Reason."

May Swenson (1913–1989), "desperately undervalued in the academy," earns two poems: "Question" (1954) and "Staring at the Sea on the Day of the Death of Another" (1972), with its "prone effigies of our unearthly selves." Lehman also surveys the two-line poem, from Charles Reznikoff's "The Old Man" to J. V. Cunningham's 1942 epigram to A. R. Ammons's "Their Sex Life" (1990).

What guides the choices?

"Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible," Lehman observes, quoting W. H. Auden. He defends poets who resisted the Pound imperative to "make it new" — above all Richard Wilbur, whose "Boy at the Window" (1956) is "excellent in every particular" without pretending to be innovative. He cites Randall Jarrell: "Anthologies are, ideally, an essential species of criticism."

Helen Vendler has attacked "historically representative anthologies," scorning a 1,800-page Library of America gathering: "So many feeble poets; so many non-moving poems; so many withered dictions." Lehman disagrees with her verdict but concedes the point behind it — an anthology must never be a "passive" index fund. Every anthology, he concludes, constitutes "a prediction, an assertion, and a wager."