Poetry to Putrescence

I shall mark this day with a white stone. That was what Lewis Carroll used to write in his diary when something of moment which gave him pleasure occurred. I seem to remember reading somewhere that it was an old Roman custom and one worth keeping up.

The reason for the celebration was discovering two undiscovered books shops in Cardiff, both of which were discovered because Carmen wanted to buy a Welsh souvenir for a particular friend of hers. I wasn’t of course allowed more than a few seconds to consider the unsuspected existence of these emporia before the needs of a guest were considered, but I was able to find a book which I purchased for later gloating.

The book is called ‘The Top 500 Poems’ edited by William Harmon and published by Columbia in 1992, although second hand, it is in good condition. The title is fairly confrontational in its assertion and it takes a little time before the raison d’etre of the book is revealed. The selection of the poems is based on their inclusion in a series of anthologies; the anthologies are not listed by the authority which has been used is cited as ‘The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry.’

What this selection purports to be is “the story of poetry in English” for the last 750 years. What it allows is a collection of poems which are exclusively Anglo-American. There seems to be no representation from other English speaking countries which are not directly connected by the Atlantic! However, this is merely a quirk which does not necessarily affect the quality of the individual poems selected. It should be the sort of selection that allows me to dip in with a fairly good chance of knowing the poet and a good chance of knowing the individual poem. This I tested as soon as I revealed the presence of the book in the shopping bag “just to see” and sure enough, it turned out that even if I didn’t know the whole of the poem cited, I certainly knew the ‘famous bit’ which made the poem famous! This was a relief, as I suspect that more and more of the poetry that I once knew is seeping away from my brain into the ether as if the poems were some sort of Mission Impossible tape which continues to self destruct after a short stay in my memory!

The volume is very satisfyingly thick and, although there are a fair number of sonnets in the collection there are also a goodly number of more substantial poems to read. Given that these are some of the most famous poems in the English language I hope that my reading will actually be more of a re-reading and if it isn’t then at least I will be filling in gaps which should have been plugged years ago.

As this volume is published in America and I suspect that the anthologies which are counted in the data base are American in their bias then there is a good chance that there will be a distinct leaning towards ‘famous’ American poems which may not necessarily correspond to the selections of poems in a predominantly British collection.

The poem in the first position as the one which h has been most anthologised is ‘The Tyger’ by William Blake and the first non British poet mentioned is Frost with ‘Stepping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. The first poem that I thought I did not know was number 28, ‘Helen’ by Poe, described by the editor as “seemingly a conglomeration of imperfections” yet, nevertheless “has been the greatest American lyric poem” for the last 150 years. Reading though it raised no real recognition in my mind until the lines:
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Was Poe the first to write that? If so, and given that I do know those lines, the first poem of which I know neither the poem nor its famous lines would be number 66 ‘Mr Flood’s Party’ by Edwin Arlington Robinson, an American described by the editor as unsuccessful in his early years but becoming in his last twenty years “among the most honoured American poets” with three Pulitzer Prizes and someone of whom I have never heard. I hope that there will be other discoveries along the way.

This is the sort of book which I need from a Spanish perspective so that I can find out the commonly accepted poetic knowledge of that Spain: discovering the equivalent in Spanish of things like ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’; ‘The burial of Sir John Moore’ and ‘Jerusalem’.

Talking of differences in national psyche, today in the international edition of ‘El Mundo’ there was a large notice on the obituaries page for a certain Franco; the same Franco who died in the seventies to general rejoicing in Catalonia. The notice described Franco as dying a Christian and urging people to go to the Basilica in the Valley of the Fallen for a service. This Basilica houses the tomb of Franco in a structure which was hollowed out of rock by slave labour provided by captured soldiers from the Spanish Civil War. It is a living disgrace and it’s something that decent Spaniards would like to see destroyed. I find it hard to believe that this was in the Spanish editions of the paper. Worth finding out. It will be very interesting to see what happens on the actual anniversary of the dictator’s death which is on the 20th of November!

I shall keep my eye on the internet!