Poetry anthologies to treasure

Francis Palgrave, the founder of the Public Record Office, didn’t like having his version of the past parcelled in neat gobbets. In his History of Normandy and England, he described anthologies as ‘sickly things’, adding that ‘cut flowers have no vitality’. His son, Francis Turner Palgrave, differed fundamentally, and, with Alfred Tennyson’s help, gathered what is still the greatest collection of English lyric poetry, The Golden Treasury, which sold 10,000 copies in six months after its publication by Macmillan in 1861 and, according to Clare Bucknell in this delightfully engaging survey of verse anthologies, had shifted 650,000 copies by 1939 and must surely now be hitting the million mark.

Having worked in adult education, Palgrave junior pitched The Golden Treasury as an improving text for inquisitive, aspirational Victorians. He also genuinely wanted to introduce them to the wide range of English poetry, providing imaginary landscapes from Shakespeare’s Arden to Scottish border ballads. As the American Robert Frost stated on moving his family across the Atlantic in 1912: ‘I said I had come to the land of The Golden Treasury. That is what I came for.’ 

Frost’s fellow countryman, the combative Ezra Pound, disagreed, describing Palgrave in 1916 as ‘that stinking sugar teat’. By then attitudes to anthologies had changed. Although The Golden Treasury still held sway, its nation-building intentions had given way to slimmer volumes of contemporary poetry, such as Edward Marsh’s Georgian Poetry (1912) and Pound’s own iconoclastic Des Imagistes (1914). And the first world war led to a glut of patriotic collections, verging on propaganda.

With her sure touch for changing tastes, Bucknell charts how the nebulous output of these armchair tub-thumpers, who summoned the Agincourt ideal and referred to vanquishing, rather than defeating, the enemy, was overtaken by the first-hand testimonies of soldier poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, who evoked the brutality of war from the front.

Fashions changed again, and, despite individualist protestations from Geoffrey Grigson in New Verse (1933), the looming Nazi threat demanded the more collectivist approach of Michael Roberts’s quasi-communist New Country in 1933, and a spate of anthologies from Faber and Oxford University Press in the 1930s, which, as Bucknell suggests, rowed back from a focus on ‘I’ to ‘we’.