Last week, an extract from Dana Gioia’s new catalogue of Philip Larkin’s work was published on New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry. Today I am delighted to bring you a second extract, this one from the section of Dana’s catalogue about Larkin’s anthology—The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. Larkin, true to form, created a controversial anthology. One reviewer wrote, “This book is a disgrace.” Dana’s entry gives a nice overview of why Larkin’s anthology warmed so many people’s blood.
The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse Chosen by Philip Larkin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
First edition, hardbound, dust jacket. Bound in the deep purple blue of Clarendon Press volumes. Gold lettering on the spine and front cover. The glossy white dust jacket is overprinted in red and lime green. First impression was 29,300 copies (with 5500 copies going to the U.S.).
The first edition was notable not only for its typos, which are common in first printings of large anthologies, but also for missing stanzas. The manuscript had been carelessly xeroxed. When the embarrassed Larkin wrote to Anthony Thwaite, he joked, “I can see myself joining Bowlder & Granger: ‘to larkinize’, v.t. to omit that part of a poem printed on verso and subsequent pages, from a notorious anthology published in the latter half of the twentieth century.”
Larkin edited this important anthology by accident. Oxford had chosen the poet Louis MacNeice to edit The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. The publisher wanted to replace William Butler Yeats’s eccentric and unsatisfactory Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936). MacNeice’s sudden death from pneumonia in 1963 forced Oxford to select another editor. The press wanted a conventional selection of the best-regarded poets so that the book could become a standard anthology. In retrospect, it is obvious that they chose the wrong editor; Larkin’s anthology was the most controversial volume he published in his lifetime.
Larkin could have assembled the book Oxford wanted, a representative selection of the Modernist consensus with a few personal touches—let the age choose the poets and the editor choose the individual poems. Larkin could have also published a reactionary alternative, a selection that denied the impact of Modernism on English letters. Instead, Larkin combined both perspectives in a single book.
The final anthology represented the standard academic canon of modern verse. The poets who received the most space were, in rank order: T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Thomas Hardy, and William Butler Yeats. No one could argue with those four pillars. The book included other expected authors—such as Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender. Larkin even included writers he disliked, such as Ted Hughes, Christopher Logue, Charles Tomlinson, and Hugh MacDiarmid.
Larkin’s twist was to augment the standard canon with non-Modernist poets. His fifth and sixth most represented figures were Rudyard Kipling and John Betjeman. He also gave good coverage to Georgian poets, then held in low esteem, such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, John Masefield, Ralph Hodgson, and Walter De La Mare. He championed outsiders who existed beyond conventional categories, such as Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, Stevie Smith, and Charles Causley. Finally, Larkin included one or two poems by numerous minor authors. Yeats’s anthology contained 98 poets; Larkin’s offered 207—with 88 poets represented by a single poem. Many of these forgotten poets had been forgotten for good reason, but the book also rediscovered many interesting poems.
The anthology had a strong nationalistic focus. Larkin took the term “English” literally. He omitted all Irish poets, except Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh. He also excluded Americans emigres, such as Ezra Pound (whom Yeats had featured), Sylvia Plath, and Anne Stevenson. Anthologies are supposed to clarify literary history by distilling the vast amount of published poetry into a manageable reading list. Larkin’s book enlarged and complicated the canon of English poetry. He presented six hundred pages of verse that demonstrated Modernism had never truly dominated English verse; it was merely the most visible of several poetic practices that co-existed simultaneously. Traditional poetry had never gone away, though it had been ignored by the tastemakers. To Larkin, Hardy and Betjeman were as important to contemporary English poets as W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Oxford had not wanted an eccentric anthology, but they got one in the most literal sense—Larkin had produced a book that denied that Modernism had been the center of twentieth century English poetry.
The academic response was immediate and angry. In his London Times review, Donald Davie began by stating, “This book is a disgrace.” When the BBC asked Donald Hall to review it, his remarks were so intemperate that the piece was never broadcast. A public debate ensued in which Larkin was accused of retreating from the international currents of Modernism and retreating into a “Little England” of outdated traditions and cozy parochialism. Larkin responded by saying he had compiled “a broad-minded book” for ordinary readers. Privately, he worried that the book too closely reflected his own taste and concerns. “I am drawing English poetry in my own image,” he fretted.
The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse sold well and remains in print. In 1999, a new edition was published containing a preface by his biographer Andrew Motion discussing the poet’s editorial choices.
Lovely cover painting on the 1999 edition
re: the reaction. Modernism sometimes sounds like a theory in search of absolute submission to its truth. Something very intolerant about that reaction. I think the idea of 'progress' in art is misguided.