Three Centuries of American Poetry

INTRODUCTIONS

On the Canon of American Poetry

There ain't no canon. There ain't going to be any canon. There never has been a canon. That's the canon.

This formulation (which I make bold to take from Gertrude Stein's famous comment on her philosophy, "There ain't any answer, etc.") is literally true. It is now more than two hundred years since the appearance of the first anthology of American verse: Elihu H. Smith's American Poems of 1793. Of the fifteen poets and sixty-five poems in that volume, only two poets (Joel Barlow and Philip Freneau) and only one poem (Freneau's "Hurricane") have survived to stand in the present anthology. Of the fifty-five poets represented in the 1840 Gems of American Poetry, only one is represented here, and that one is Clement Moore, the author of "A Visit from St. Nicholas."

By 1900 there was so much American poetry to choose from that extreme anthological principles were invoked. E. C. Stedman's American Anthology of 1900 included works by 537 poets, while C. H. Page's The Chief American Poets (1905) whittled that number down to nine. If Stedman seems unfocused, Page seems rash. Page included Bryant, Poe, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, Whitman, and Lanier. No Bradstreet, no Taylor, no Dickinson, no Melville, no Robinson. In the cases of Taylor and Dickinson, we are simply lucky that the twentieth century discovered and printed poetry that was unknown in its own day. In the cases of Bradstreet, Melville, and Robinson, one can only say that taste changes. It is difficult to find a single American poet, currently considered important, who has not, at some time, for some reason, been left out. The anthology called Parnassus (1874), edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson and his daughter Edith, inexplicably contains no poetry by Whitman. Oscar Williams's and Edwin Honig's Major American Poets (1962) contains no T. S. Eliot because Eliot's publisher's policy at the time was "not to allow Mr. Eliot's poetry to appear in paperback books selling for less than $1.75."

More discoveries will be made and taste will change. An anthology of American poetry a hundred years from now will be as different from this one as this one is from either Stedman's or Page's. This volume is not intended to set a seal upon the past. It is meant, rather, as an invitation to the reader of today and to those poets whose names we do not yet know. "In our ordinary states of mind," Emerson once observed, "we deem not only letters in general but the most famous books part of a pre-established harmony, fatal, unalterable. . . . But Man is critic of all these also and should treat the entire extant product of the human intellect as only one age, revisable, corrigible, reversible by him."

The canon is dead. Long live the canon.

Robert D. Richardson, Jr.

Middletown, Connecticut

August 1998

OF THOSE "WHO LIVE AND SPEAK FOR AYE"

Wallace Stevens urges: "Speak it." But speech has many variants: murmur, chant, song, bluster, malediction, hymn, psalm--modes that conjure not a chorus but a fraternity-sorority of soloists. The patient work of many blessèd editors has in our present century amplified the speech of earlier centuries, giving Bradstreet, Taylor, Dickinson,

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Title of ebook: Three Centuries of American Poetry
ISBN: 9780307569233
parent-ISBN: 9780553375183
Publisher: Bantam Books
Pages: 768
Published: 08-2009
Released online for download: 08-26-2009
Editor: Mandelbaum, Allen
Editor: Richardson, Robert D. Jr

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Three Centuries of American Poetry

INTRODUCTIONS

On the Canon of American Poetry

There ain't no canon. There ain't going to be any canon. There never has been a canon. That's the canon.

This formulation (which I make bold to take from Gertrude Stein's famous comment on her philosophy, "There ain't any answer, etc.") is literally true. It is now more than two hundred years since the appearance of the first anthology of American verse: Elihu H. Smith's American Poems of 1793. Of the fifteen poets and sixty-five poems in that volume, only two poets (Joel Barlow and Philip Freneau) and only one poem (Freneau's "Hurricane") have survived to stand in the present anthology. Of the fifty-five poets represented in the 1840 Gems of American Poetry, only one is represented here, and that one is Clement Moore, the author of "A Visit from St. Nicholas."

By 1900 there was so much American poetry to choose from that extreme anthological principles were invoked. E. C. Stedman's American Anthology of 1900 included works by 537 poets, while C. H. Page's The Chief American Poets (1905) whittled that number down to nine. If Stedman seems unfocused, Page seems rash. Page included Bryant, Poe, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, Whitman, and Lanie ... read full excerpt from: Three Centuries of American Poetry ebook

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