American Poetry
The Twentieth Century.
Edited by Robert Hass, John Hollander, Carolyn Kizer, Nathaniel Mackey
and Marjorie Perloff.
Volume I: Henry Adams
to Dorothy Parker, 986 pp.
Volume II: E. E. Cummings
to May Swenson, 1,009 pp.
New York: Library of America.
$35 each.

It would be pleasant if period anthologies of poetry could simply be received with gratitude and dipped into with pleasure. But as soon as such volumes are opened, other motives present themselves. We look to see which names weigh the most and with which poems; we see how much room lesser worthies have been accorded and note the brief appearance of the obscure or forgotten; we are grateful for the enterprise over all and eager to complain about particularities.

Seven years ago, the Library of America published "American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century," two volumes totaling just over 2,000 pages, ably selected and edited by John Hollander. It will take twice as many pages to represent the 20th century, since in these first two volumes no poet born after 1913 is included. This makes for odd separations: Volume II ends with Delmore Schwartz, Karl Shapiro and May Swenson (all born in 1913), leaving Randall Jarrell and John Berryman (born the following year) to open the two additional volumes yet to be published. The earliest poets represented in any bulk in Volume I are Edgar Lee Masters and Edwin Arlington Robinson; from there to the end of Volume II, 206 figures present themselves. It is a remarkable feat of assemblage, with excellent capsule biographies and explanatory notes at the end of each volume -- the biographies, especially, are well worth reading -- though I miss the useful chronology that gave context to selections in the 19th-century predecessor.

Who are the most significant poets in the first half of "American Poetry: The Twentieth Century"? Robert Frost has the most poems (59), but has fewer pages than Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens or T. S. Eliot -- probably because they're represented by longer works. William Carlos Williams shares equal space with Frost; Hart Crane is only slightly behind. Major chunks of both volumes are also given over to Marianne Moore, H. D. and Gertrude Stein. (In the case of the last two, perhaps excessively. Stein thought her effusions in "Tender Buttons" were poems, but almost 15 pages of them didn't convince me.)

One needn't insist that an anthology like this one redraw or rethink our poetic landscape -- which is lucky, because such a redrawing won't be found here. (Although it is surprising that Pound wins the space race, since he is less frequented by current readers of poetry than Frost, Stevens or Eliot.) From the main figures of the period, we are given a number of long poems intact: "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," "The Waste Land," "The Bridge," "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction." Eliot's "Four Quartets" is represented only by "Burnt Norton"; Pound's "Cantos" are given a well-chosen 30 pages. The individual selections are excellent: there is the occasional absence of lyrics that I would have included -- Frost's "Gift Outright" or Williams's "Danse Russe" or Stevens's "High-Toned Old Christian Woman" -- but such omissions are inevitable.

In the 19th-century anthology, Whitman and Dickinson dominated, with Emerson, Melville and Longfellow following at a respectable distance, trailed in turn by Whittier, Bryant and Poe. But the figures who accompanied them, for all their differences, seem more akin to one another than do those who come after (in pages allotted) the major moderns. How are we to begin to classify the likes of such generously represented figures as Stein, H. D., Charles Olson, Elizabeth Bishop, Louis Zukofsky, E. E. Cummings, Robinson, Robert Penn Warren and George Oppen? How are we to "understand" this non-group of poets, except by hauling out tired categories like traditionalist, objectivist and whatever you call Cummings?

The notion of providing equal time for wholly dissimilar talents reminds us that unlike the previous Hollander anthology, this new one does not reflect the taste and guidance of a single editorial mind. We have instead an advisory board of five poets and scholars, each of whom doubtless has his or her favorites. So if Zukofsky, Oppen and Charles Reznikoff get more space than (it seems to me) they're collectively or individually worth, we note that Marjorie Perloff, who has written enthusiastically about them, is on the committee. If Robinson Jeffers weighs in more heavily than John Crowe Ransom, we remember that Robert Hass, also on the committee, did a selected edition of Jeffers some years back.

In reading the post-Whitman selections from the previous anthology, one was prepared to undergo large doses of solemnity, of portentous declamation unsalted by the least trace of humor. To judge by this new anthology, the coming of modernism didn't change things all that much: one encounters plenty of vatic pronouncements in the pages devoted to, among others, Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Rexroth, William Everson, H. D. and Olson. So I was happy to encounter Edmund Wilson's cruel, cruelly funny poem "The Omelet of A. MacLeish" ("And the questions and questions / questioning / What am I? O / What shall I remember? / O my people / a pensive dismay / What have I left unsaid?") as a tonic for poetic flatulence generally. Yet MacLeish is sparsely and poorly represented by a mere eight pages capturing his earlier, pompous manner rather than the fine mix of sympathy and irony he achieved in later poems like "Mark's Sheep" (about Mark Van Doren) and "Family Group" (about his brother, dead in World War I). In support of the anti-solemn, it is also fitting that Volume I ends with the astringent humor of Dorothy Parker. (Other lighter-versers show up admirably: Don Marquis, Phyllis McGinley, Kenneth Fearing and Ogden Nash.)

Since no editorial rationale accompanies the anthology, one can only guess at the collective motive for including famous names like Ma Rainey, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Bessie Smith, Oscar Hammerstein II, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Dorothy Fields, Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser and Lightnin' Hopkins. Are blues artists and song lyricists poets or "poets," and does it make a difference? Do we accept "I Get a Kick Out of You" as appropriately plugged in between Claude McKay and Djuna Barnes, the writers flanking Cole Porter? For me, the fun in simply reading Hammerstein's "Ol' Man River," Hart's "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" or Bessie Smith's "Empty Bed Blues" is significantly diminished; I'd rather turn on the phonograph instead.

Among the enlivening activities we perform in traversing these pages are to notice writers we had forgotten, misplaced or just never gotten around to reading properly. And then there's the "How could they leave out?" response: How could they leave out X? Not give more space to Y? Exclude that poem of Z's? On the positive side, I found Vachel Lindsay delightful (especially "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan"); looked at Elinor Wylie ("Wild Peaches") with an appreciative eye for the first time; decided I'd been too dismissive of Jeffers; was dazzled by the variety of Langston Hughes, charmed by three humorously resourceful poems of Rolfe Humphries and more than arrested by Robert Hayden's lyric precision and depth. On the negative side, though I found no worthy poet missing (maybe Kenneth Burke, in his odd, slapdash way), I balked at giving the exquisite Ransom only 14 pages as contrasted with Zukofky's 31 or Rukeyser's 20. Where is Millay's beautiful "Return," so admired by Edmund Wilson? And although Bishop is generously represented, she deserves even more space, so that late wonders like "The End of March," "Poem," "The Moose" and the "North Haven" elegy for Robert Lowell could find a place.

Almost 40 years ago, at the National Poetry Festival in Washington, Randall Jarrell surveyed 50 years of our poetry, from roughly 1910 on. His prefatory claim was that after some decades at the end of the last century in which not much good poetry got written, no one would have predicted that "in the next 50 years American poetry would be the best and most influential in the English language," shifting "the whole center of gravity of poetry in English . . . west of England." To go no farther than a list of eight poets from those years -- Frost, Stevens, Williams, Pound, Moore, Eliot, Crane, Bishop -- is to have Jarrell's judgment inescapably enforced. "Pure products of America" (in a happier sense than William Carlos Williams meant the phrase), they have been handsomely given their place in these two volumes.

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