Mexican-born poet, publisher, and pundit Michael Schmidt is a formidable presence in the world of letters. Founder (in 1969) of
Carcanet Press, he's championed the work of many neglected or unfashionable figures, from
John Clare and
Robert Graves to
Sylvia Townsend Warner and
Ivor Gurney.
I've already written a piece extolling Schmidt's extravagantly learned
The Novel: A Biography (2014). But this is just one of the massive tomes he's written. They include:
- Lives of the Poets (1998)
- The Story of Poetry. 3 vols (2001-2006):
- From Cædmon to Caxton
- From Skelton to Dryden
- From Pope to Burns
- The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets (2004)
- The Novel: A Biography (2014)
This particular post, however, is about a little side-venture of his: the Penguin Classics "
Poetry First Editions". So far as I can tell, this series lasted only a year or so. Which is to say that all of the eight titles I've been able to find details of seem to have been published in 1999, at the turn of the millennium. They were presumably collected in a boxset sometime after that.
So why do I assume that Schmidt was behind this enterprise? I guess because he contributed "notes on the text" to both of the books in this series I own myself - Robert Burns and John Keats - as well (it would appear) to the other six.
- [1786] Robert Burns: Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect
- [1798] William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads
- [1814] Lord Byron: The Corsair
- [1820] John Keats: Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes &c.
- [1896] A. E. Housman: A Shropshire Lad
- [1915] Rupert Brooke: 1914 and Other Poems
- [1923] D. H. Lawrence: Birds, Beasts and Flowers
- [1928] W. B. Yeats: The Tower
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What's the first thing that strikes you when you look at this list? It's certainly eclectic and wide-ranging, but isn't it just a
little surprising that all of authors on display are old, dead, white guys?
Old and dead, yes, that could be explained away by the nature of what was (presumably) meant to be a largely historical project: resurrecting important individual books of poems from the works of well-known poets we tend to encounter only in anthologies or in collected editions.
But
white? Well, if you look at the list again, and try to deduce its approximate parameters, it would appear to be confined to poets from the British Isles. There are no Americans, no colonials, no poets writing in languages other than English (unless you count Burns). Finding a
non-white poet to include might have risked sounding like tokenism, given the racial - and class - stranglehold on higher education (and publishing) characteristic of the British literary tradition until, at the very least, the mid-twentieth century.
The absence of any women poets demands a bit more explanation, though.
Back in the late nineteenth century, when he was putting together his classic
Oxford Book of English Verse, Sir Arthur Quiller Couch seems to have had little difficulty in arriving at a satisfactory definition of just what he meant by poetry:
The best is the best, though a hundred judges have declared it so; nor had it been any feat to search out and insert the second-rate merely because it happened to be recondite.
Forty years later, when he attempted to update his work, he must have felt a bit more pressure to justify
the nature of his choices:
Of experiment I still hold myself fairly competent to judge. But, writing in 1939, I am at a loss what to do with a fashion of morose disparagement; of sneering at things long by catholic consent accounted beautiful; of scorning at ‘Man’s unconquerable mind’ and hanging up (without benefit of laundry) our common humanity as a rag on a clothes-line. Be it allowed that these present times are dark. Yet what are our poets of use — what are they for — if they cannot hearten the crew with auspices of daylight?
God knows what the old man thought of Auden and the other
Macspaunday poets as they extolled communism and tried vainly to bring an end to "
the old gang":
The hard bitch and the riding-master,
Stiff underground; deep in clear lake
The lolling bridegroom, beautiful, there.
No, so far as Q was concerned:
The reader, turning the pages of this book, will find this note of valiancy — of the old Roman ‘virtue’ mated with cheerfulness — dominant throughout, if in many curious moods. He may trace it back, if he care, far behind Chaucer to the rudest beginnings of English Song. It is indigenous, proper to our native spirit, and it will endure.
If you reexamine the list of Poetry First Editions above, it's pretty clear that it's largely confined to the Romantic tradition in English verse. There are no Augustan satirists, no Modernists, no problem poets of any kind. The tradition this list embodies would have been perfectly acceptable to Q and other turn-of-the-century conservatives, determined to stick to the well-made lyric and eschew any other approach to writing verse. No Basil Bunting, T. S. Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound - not even Wilfred Owen or Isaac Rosenberg need apply.
And yet, if you turn back the clock
50 years, to
1975 (rather than
25, to the
1999 Penguin list) you'll find the following '
Poetry Reprint Series' of facsimile reprints of influential first slim volumes of verse published jointly by St James Press in London and St Martin's Press in New York:
Books I own are marked in bold:
- [1916] Robert Graves: Over the Brazier
- [1916] H.D.: Sea Garden
- [1923] Wallace Stevens: Harmonium
- [1931] John Betjeman: Mount Zion
- [1914] Conrad Aiken: Earth Triumphant
Robert Graves. Over the Brazier. 1916. Poetry Reprint Series, 1. London: St. James Press / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975.
H.D. Sea Garden. 1916. Poetry Reprint Series, 2. London: St. James Press / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975.
Man Ray: H.D. (1896-1961)
Wallace Stevens. Harmonium. 1923. Poetry Reprint Series, 3. London: St. James Press / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975.
John Betjeman. Mount Zion; or, In Touch with the Infinite. Illustrated by de Cronin Hastings et al. 1931. Poetry Reprint Series, 4. London: St. James Press / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975.
Conrad Aiken. Earth Triumphant and Other Tales in Verse. 1914. Poetry Reprint Series, 5. London: St. James Press / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975.
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How exciting that "
Poetry Reprint Series" still looks today! The ratio of Americans to Brits is, admittedly, 3 to 2, and all the books are from the twentieth century, but at least they've included H.D.'s marvellous first volume alongside all the blokes. Nor do they seem to be averse to experimental or even humorous poetry.
Was the idea, then, with the later 1999 '
Poetry First Editions' series, to stick solely to exceptionally bestselling and/or influential volumes of verse?
Keats's third book may well have been the latter, but it certainly wasn't the former. It sold as badly as the first two - until the news of his early death came out, that is.
Rupert Brooke's book, by contrast, sold by the truckload, both before and after his own death. Why, then, the need to resurrect it now?
If, too, the dates can range over a century and a half, from 1786 to 1928, then why wasn't
Emily Brontë included? Why no
Christina Rossetti? Why not
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous (or, if you prefer, infamous)
Sonnets from the Portuguese?
W. E. Henley's free verse poems from the 1870s, eventually collected as
In Hospital (1903), would surely offer a salutary alternative to the flood of over-ornate verbiage characteristic of the High Victorian age. And if the intention was to cast back to the late eighteenth century, why not open your list with
William Blake's
Poetical Sketches (1783), as a companion piece to
Burns?
Talking of other inclusions alongside Burns, how about one of
John Clare's books? Perhaps
Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), or
The Rural Muse (1835).
None of these - it should be stressed - are meant as radical or revisionist suggestions. If the original objective of the series was to revisit influential mainstream poetry books which have left their mark on British writing in general, it does seem absurd that this opening salvo should have been so sedulously limited to the pale, stale and male.
Perhaps, in the end, that's why they decided not to persevere with the series. It's a shame, though, because these books are - in themselves - both beautiful and useful. I'm sorry that, as in the case of those 1975 "Poetry First Editions" books, there was no set 2 to straighten up the balance a bit.
I've included
my own suggested list of supplementary or alternative inclusions directly below the original Penguin list below:
- [1786] Robert Burns (1759-1796): Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect
- [1798] Wordsworth (1770-1850) & Coleridge (1772-1834): Lyrical Ballads
- [1814] Lord Byron (1788-1824): The Corsair
- [1820] John Keats (1795-1821): Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes &c.
- [1896] A. E. Housman (1859-1936): A Shropshire Lad
- [1915] Rupert Brooke (1887-1915): 1914 and Other Poems
- [1923] D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930): Birds, Beasts and Flowers
- [1928] W. B. Yeats (1865-1939): The Tower
Robert Burns. Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. 1786. Note on the Text by Michael Schmidt. Poetry First Editions. London: Penguin, 1999.
- Robert Burns. The Kilmarnock Poems [Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, 1786]. Ed. Donald A. Low. Everyman's Library. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1985..
William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. 1798. Note on the Text by Michael Schmidt. Poetry First Editions. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
- William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads 1805. 1798. Ed. Derek Roper. 1968. Collins Annotated Student Texts. London: Collins Publishers, 1973.
Lord Byron. The Corsair. 1814. Note on the Text by Michael Schmidt. Poetry First Editions. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
- The Poetical Works of Lord Byron. Ed. Frederick Page. 1904. Rev. ed. 1945. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.
John Keats. Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems. 1820. Note on the Text by Michael Schmidt. Poetry First Editions. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
- Jack Stillinger, ed. The Poems of John Keats. The Definitive Edition. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1978.
A. E. Housman. A Shropshire Lad. 1896. Note on the Text by Michael Schmidt. Poetry First Editions. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
- A. E. Housman. A Shropshire Lad. 1896. London: Grant Richards Ltd., 1923.
Rupert Brooke. 1914 and Other Poems. 1915. Note on the Text by Michael Schmidt. Poetry First Editions. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
- Rupert Brooke. 1914 and Other Poems. 1915. London: Faber, 1941.
D. H. Lawrence. Birds, Beasts and Flowers. 1923. Note on the Text by Michael Schmidt. Poetry First Editions. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
- The Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence. Vol. 2: Unrhyming Poems. 2 vols. London: Martin Secker, 1928.
W. B. Yeats. The Tower. 1928. Note on the Text by Michael Schmidt. Poetry First Editions. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
- The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Peter Allt & Russell K. Alspach. 1957. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1973.
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And here's my own (doubtless very subjective) counter-list:
- [1783] William Blake (1757-1827): Poetical Sketches
- [1820] John Clare (1793-1864): Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery
- [1846] Emily Brontë (1818-1848): Poems by Currer, Ellis & Acton Bell
- [1850] Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861): Sonnets from the Portuguese
- [1850] Christina Rossetti (1830-1894): Goblin Market and Other Poems
- [1903] W. E. Henley (1849-1903): In Hospital
- [1918] G. M. Hopkins (1844-1889): Poems
- [1920] Wilfred Owen (1893-1918): Poems
- [1932] W. H. Auden (1907-1973): The Orators
William Blake. Poetical Sketches (1783)
- Poetry and Prose of William Blake: Complete in One Volume. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. The Centenary Edition. 1927. London: the Nonesuch Press / New York: Random House, 1948.
John Clare. Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820)
- The Poems of John Clare. Ed. J. W. Tibble. 2 vols. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1935.
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Currer, Ellis & Acton Bell: Poems (1846)
Emily Brontë [as 'Ellis Bell]: Poems (1846)
- Emily Jane Brontë. The Complete Poems. Ed. C. W. Hatfield. 1941. New York & London: Columbia University Press & Oxford University Press, 1963.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
- The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Oxford Complete Edition. London: Henry Frowde / Oxford University Press, 1908.
Christina Rossetti. Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)
- The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti. Ed. William Michael Rossetti. 1904. The Globe Edition. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1924.
- Christina Rossetti. The Complete Poems. Ed. R. W. Crump. 1979-90. Notes & Introduction by Betty S. Flowers. 2001. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005.
- Christina Rossetti. Goblin Market. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. London: Harrap Limited, 1984.
Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. Robert Bridges (1918)
- Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. Robert Bridges. 1918. Second Edition With an Appendix of Additional Notes, and a Critical Introduction by Charles Williams. 1930. The Oxford Bookshelf. 1937. London: Oxford University Press, 1941.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Poems: Fourth Edition, based on the First Edition of 1918 and enlarged to incorporate all known poems and fragments. Ed. W. H. Gardner & N. H. MacKenzie. 1967. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.
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Wilfred Owen: Poems (1920)
Wilfred Owen. Poems. Ed. Siegfried Sassoon (1920)
- The Poems of Wilfred Owen. Ed. with a Memoir and Notes by Edmund Blunden. 1931. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1963.
- The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. Ed. Cecil Day Lewis. 1963. Memoir by Edmund Blunden. 1931. A Chatto & Windus Paperback CWP 18. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1977.
- Wilfred Owen. The Complete Poems and Fragments. 2 vols. Ed. Jon Stallworthy. 1983. Rev. ed. Chatto & Windus. London: Random House, 2013.
W. H. Auden. The Orators (1932)
- W. H. Auden. The Orators: An English Study. 1932. London: Faber, 1966.
- W. H. Auden. Poems. Volume I: 1927-1939. The Complete Works of W. H. Auden. Ed. Edward Mendelson. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022.
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So there you are! 8 + 5 + 9 =
22 wonderful books of poetry we'd all be a lot worse off without. I wish I had enough space here to write a treatise on each them: but luckily such information isn't hard to access nowadays.
If you haven't read at least a few of them, you really should. You won't regret it. I promise.
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