Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry into Anthologies (review) Rebecca L. Walkowitz MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, Volume 64, Number 1, March 2003, pp. 123-126 (Review) Published by Duke University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/39490 No institutional affiliation (13 Nov 2018 07:14 GMT)
Reviews Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry into Anthologies. By Anne Ferry. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. 289 pp. At the heart of Anne Ferry s learned book are two striking, important contentions: anthologies do not simply assemble literary traditions but constitute one of their own, and the tradition of anthologies in poetry has helped formulate the tradition of single-author publications. Literary critics often dismiss poetry anthologies as a degradation of poets or poems, but Ferry contends that today s literary standards have their origins in yesterday s anthologies. Describing anthologies of the past, Ferry establishes a history for poetry writing and reading in the present: she shows that the tradition of anthologies has shaped how poetry is published and organized into books, how it is read, what new poetry is written and embraced, what values it is thought to embody. Tradition and the Individual Poem tracks poetry anthologies in English from the sixteenth century to the present, stopping along the way to examine significant volumes and significant poems anthology pieces as they have been ushered from one volume to another. It also invites readers to reassess and historicize critical assumptions about poetry as a genre. Ferry troubles the notion of individual talent by focusing on individual poems. In her meticulous discussion of Elizabeth Bishop s anthology piece The Fish, she argues persuasively that anthologists often select entries whose formal and conceptual principles match those of the anthology itself: because it privileges serendipity, Bishop s poem reflects and even accommodates the anthology s structure of chance encounter and diverse juxtaposition (177). Similarly, the category of public poem is often occupied by works, such as Oliver Goldsmith s The Deserted Village, that privilege, much as anthologies do, those images, popular allusions, and literary references that the common reader knows how to identify (138 39). For Ferry, the point is not that public poems make good anthology pieces, though they do, but that they and anthologies have comparable goals: Goldsmith s poem Modern Language Quarterly 64:1, March 2003. 2003 University of Washington.
124 MLQ March 2003 uses diction so deeply embedded in familiar English poems from Come live with me and be my love to Elegy Written in a Country-churchyard that it could seem to belong to the common language (139). Anthologies help create commonality by favoring poems that make shared experience both a priority and an aspiration. Ferry suggests that the institutional devices of fame, such as the anthology, may confer popularity or appreciation on a poem or poet rather than merely recognize it. Many of her examples focus on the intellectual and historical conditions of anthology production and on the process through which anthologies establish specific literary and social values. At times, however, she treats critical judgments less historically, especially when it comes to practices of reading. She often describes the act of reading as if it were consistent from one century to the next, as if readers were a predictable or homogeneous group, and as if anthologies and poems passively encountered reading without transforming it. Ferry expresses this sensibility when she makes general comments about the reader s response to the poem (72), adjudicates the more precise reading that a certain anthology promotes (55), or accuses some anthologists of encouraging... a misleading response to a poem by asserting in the headnotes that its content can be explained by the poet s biography (35). As she asks about categories of poems and standards of selection, so she might ask about reading itself: What methods of reading do anthologies cultivate? How do anthologies train and distinguish readers, as individuals and as collectivities? How have anthologies helped develop the standards by which readings are measured? At the end of the book Ferry argues that poets often compose new work in response to the traditions established by prestigious anthologies. Maintaining, accommodating, rewriting, or refusing those traditions, poets internalize the anthology s structural effects (collage, comparison, and national or historical narrative). But for Ferry, the anthology is also something less concrete than a book. She proposes that many poets are influenced, so to speak, by an imaginary anthology (253), which they conceive retrospectively to justify a new poem. The poem is made to belong to the anthology, which the poet s mind has created to make the poem necessary, logical, natural to the tradition established for it. Ferry derives this argument from T. S. Eliot s poetry and essays, particularly the well-known Tradition and the Individual Talent. For Ferry, as for Eliot, literary history can be figured as an anthology (5). Her position has two contradictory meanings. She argues that literary history is marked by the same institutional contexts as anthologies (the classroom, the publisher, editorial ambition, the marketplace, cultures, national languages). However, with Eliot, she also suggests that anthologies participate in the same natural order as literary history: the anthology, apart from its existence as a book, is a model of civilization s continuity, because it confirms the intellectual and literary trajectory that it also contains. Ferry
Walkowitz Review 125 notices, interestingly, that Eliot s theory of timeless order is itself produced through the selection and presentation of disparate materials: in his poems, essays, and reviews he acted out... the incorporation of his own work into the tradition (248). Eliot s poems, Ferry argues, were influenced by his theory of literary tradition, the imaginary anthology leading to the practice of poetry writing; poets opposed to Eliot, on the other hand, such as Robert Frost and Philip Larkin, registered their discontent by making real anthologies, which served both to contest and to reproduce Eliot s imaginary practice. Ferry s book makes the admirable assertion that the anthology is a worthy and necessary object of critical attention, and her careful research yields rich materials for further study. But she is reluctant to provide a theoretical context for these materials, such as the recent, vibrant work on the history of the book, of authorship, and of critical norms. Ferry might have looked to the work of Jeffrey Masten, who provides an excellent theory of collaborative authorship in early modern drama; to that of Leah Price on the anthology and the novel; or to that of John Guillory on the history of reading. 1 Her theoretical scope is limited, moreover, by her failure to consider the twentiethcentury anthologies, such as those of women poets, African American poets, and experimental poets, that have tried to expand or contest the critical definitions of tradition. Her explanation for this exclusion is thin: first, she merely quotes someone else s explanation; second, her explanation amounts to a tautology (6 7). Ferry examines only centrist collections because my interest, paralleling [Robert] von Hallberg s, is in anthologies of poetry written with an eye to the center. 2 In this example and in others Ferry s style of inquiry tends toward description rather than narration or contention: she develops no general theories about the history of reading and writing. To the extent that anthologies by their structure, by their principles of inclusion and exclusion, by their institutional contexts influence reading methods as much as specific interpretations, they may be said to create readers, not merely engage them. How does the reading of anthologies, as the training ground for almost all readers of poetry, affect the reading of single-author collections? What is the effect of training by anthology? How did the ubiquity of poetry anthologies make the development of poets different from that of writers in other gen- 1 Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); John Guillory, The Ethical Practice of Modernity: The Example of Reading, in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 2000), 29 46. 2 Robert von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture, 1945 1980 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 9.
126 MLQ March 2003 res, in which different kinds of collaboration and anthologization existed? These are a few of the questions that Ferry leaves for other critics to explore. Rebecca L. Walkowitz, University of Wisconsin at Madison Theatre of the Book, 1480 1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe. By Julie Stone Peters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xii + 494 pp. This massive and gorgeously produced book constitutes a daunting object for review. It consists of fifteen chapters in five parts (312 pages of text in small print, with 1,453 notes in yet smaller type occupying an additional 131 pages, plus another 42 pages devoted to a Works Cited list of more than 1,000 items). Sixty handsome illustrations are scattered throughout. Four hundred years of book and theater history are surveyed, with copious references to English, French, German, Austrian, Italian, and Spanish sources. Translations of quotations are supplied by the author (and much appreciated by this reader). I doubt that many reviewers could claim to judge the contents in their entirety with any authority, and certainly I am in no position to do so. The best one can do is to describe the venture, offer some methodological assessment, and test its execution in the realms of one s competence, which in my case is mostly England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The rather grandiose title conveys a sense of scope without any very precise indication of aim and method. Building on the topic of her earlier book, Congreve, the Drama, and the Printed Word, Professor Peters says that she wants to offer an account of the entangled histories of print and the modern stage, addressing the meaning of this relationship for the theatre itself and for the broader cultural understanding of text and performance between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries (2). She describes it as straightforwardly, a history of the interactions between print and theatre. In practice, the book is largely an account of how print represents theater (including drama) and of the political, social, and economic contexts in which plays and books about the theater were published. Peters covers the span between the origins of printing and the time at which theater began to get recorded in photographs (and subsequently on sound recordings and film). Theatre of the Book has no explicitly defined method. In one paragraph and a long note Peters makes a gesture toward phenomenology, hermeneutics, and semiotics, with reference to Barthes, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Iser, Jauss, the Prague School, and others, after which virtually all reference to theory disappears. One would hardly wish this massive tome to be devoted to the application of any or all possible theorists, but lack of clarity in purpose Modern Language Quarterly 64:1, March 2003. 2003 University of Washington.