So that’s why the British are so well-versed

The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies And The Making Of British Culture Clare Bucknell Head of Zeus £27.99 ★★★★★

The first printed anthology of national poetry, Songes And Sonnettes, was not published in England until 1557, but the practice of gathering selected verse into a single volume was an ancient one. In the First Century BC the Greek poet Meleager of Gadara brought together a collection of epigrammatic poems from the previous two centuries (as well as many of his own) entitled Stephanos, or ‘garland’. In his preface, Meleager compared each poet to a different plant or flower. The word anthology derives from the Greek anthologia, or ‘flower-gathering’.

In Britain the form found fertile soil. By the late 18th Century the poetry anthology occupied a key role in the dissemination of the best of British verse, popular both in schools and among private readers.

The anthologist, one scholar wrote in 1738, served as a ‘reader-general for mankind’ who, ‘void of all prejudice’, would select for his readers only the ‘most exquisite’ of literary blooms. But, as Clare Bucknell’s lively book makes clear, anthologies, like history itself, can only ever be partial, in both senses of that word. An anthologist’s inclusions – and their omissions – reflect, intentionally or otherwise, their personal prejudices and the prevailing attitudes of their times.

The Treasuries does not set out to provide a complete history of the anthology. Instead, in eight chapters, it uses eight influential British anthologies, or groups of anthologies, to explore how, over the centuries, those collections have both shaped and reflected British society and culture. Bucknell is interested in the power of the anthology as ‘intervention’, whether ‘political, social, moral or psychological’, and her sweep is deliberately broad, from the savagely satirical and frequently scurrilous Poems On Affairs Of State series, first published in 1689, to the spate of modern anthologies that present poetry as a psychotherapeutic tool, a source of solace.

The book is most successful where poetry and history most directly collide. Bucknell’s first chapter focuses on the radical ballads and poems of the 17th and 18th Centuries, political satires that tore into the private and public conduct of the monarchs and ministers of the Stuart era.

Though Charles I’s government had passed an act banning the publication of any material without prior approval by the state, these lampoons still circulated clandestinely, copied out by hand and passed between friends.

Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary of a

‘most bitter lampoone’ passed to him by a colleague, declaring it ‘mighty witty and mighty severe’. (Among the many nuggets Bucknell delights in sharing with the reader, we learn that the word lampoon derived from the French word ‘lampons’ meaning ‘let’s drink’, as they were most often read aloud at boozy evenings.)

It was not until after James II was deposed by William III that these verses appeared in print, three slim volumes all with the title Poems On Affairs Of State.

Suddenly these broadsides were available beyond the narrow circles of the court. The public gobbled them up.

As more books were published they grew in boldness, until a ballad in the 1707 edition defamed Queen Anne. The fallout killed off the franchise but, as Bucknell convincingly argues, by then the damage was done: the anthologies left behind them a widespread hunger for political lampoons.

There is an excellent chapter on the fears generated by the explosion of reading, especially among women, towards the end of the 1700s. Another explores the poetry of the Great War, tracking the shift from the classically inspired heroic patriotism of the (mostly civilian) poets in 1914 towards the bitter disillusion of soldier-poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

Bucknell draws a direct line between the preface of 1915’s Poems Of Today, which Owen owned, in which the editor urged readers to listen for ‘the passing-bell of Death’ in the poetry of Rupert Brooke and Laurence Binyon, and the opening line of Owen’s Anthem For Doomed Youth: ‘What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?’

Other sections are less successful. The final chapter on contemporary self-help anthologies is especially thin, closing the book with a disappointing whimper. Disappointing too is Bucknell’s largely male and pale view of British culture: where are the women poets, the black British poets? Perhaps next time.