Abstract: This essay investigates examples of how Robert Graves’s poetry has been popularly anthologised, within a broader examination of the history and idea of the poetry anthology. It draws out key issues involved in the anthology as a form, considers the role that anthologies play both in the ongoing reception of a poet’s work and the cultural life of poetry at large, and proposes principles on which the practice of anthologising may be freshly conceived and developed.

Keywords: poetry anthologies, editing, authorial reputation, curation, taste, creative-critical relation

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The Reception of Poetry: Reputation and the Role of the Anthology

I address here the idea of the poetry anthology – and examples of the way that Robert Graves’s poetry has been popularly anthologised – to draw out some of the issues involved in the anthology as a form, together with the role anthologies play both in the ongoing reception of a poet’s work and the cultural life of poetry at large.[1]

What, for example, is the impression of Graves as a poet that each micro-selection from his work gives, in the anthologies that I’m going to touch upon? Does it feel accurate? What other impressions might we wish to create? Which, say, six poems would you choose to represent his poetry? What are the motivating principles behind these various selections? As these questions suggest, the idea of the anthology and the acts of selection it involves raise significant issues regarding the curation of a body of work in poetry, and the development of the poet’s reputation – which are in turn affected by the practical realities and economic norms in and around publishing.

On the subject of reputation, it is hard to isolate one element in the chain of cause, effect, and dissemination. Graves’s reputation and place in the popular imagination developed in many directions over the course of his lifetime: war poet, Georgian, critic of (and participant in) the modernist milieu, memoirist, novelist, idiosyncratic literary scholar, Oxford professor, self-declared ‘Muse poet’, and so on. He’s one of the (very) few British poets of the twentieth century that reached a large American audience, and indeed had an extensive global reputation – though this is perhaps largely through the curious cultural timeliness of The White Goddess, a prose refraction of the distinctive character of his commitment, experience and intelligence as a poet, as it had developed by the 1940s. Its meditation on the idea of the poet, magic and religion can be read as the consummation and indeed manifesto of his very personal solution to the psychic pressures that he had faced, and his need to find a way of accommodating himself within (and in some ways against) the world as he found it. Its ambition alone gave Graves a unique place in contemporary literature.

It is telling to look at the difference between two reviews by the American critic (and poet) Randall Jarrell in this regard. Here he is in a review of Graves’s Collected Poems in 1940:

Robert Graves’s poems are pleasant, rather interesting, nicely constructed, noticeably his own; he is agreeably sensible and able; so it is really unpleasant to decide that he is not a good poet, that even his best poems just miss. There is too much comment, fancy, anecdote; one thinks, ‘Sensible! Rather witty! Nicely put!’ but never how moving or extraordinary or right.[2]

But, in a display of a doubleness in himself akin to the doubleness that he came to see in Graves, in 1955, Jarrell writes of Graves’s Collected Poems as (together with Elizabeth Bishop’s Poems) one of the ‘best books of poetry of our time’: ‘If you want to read some of the poems your great-great-grandchildren will be reading, these are the books for you to buy’ (p. 241).Of the poems themselves, Jarrell says: ‘Some are extraordinary, many are masterly, all are like nothing else ever written […] In them many things – some of them most unusual things – are well felt, well seen, well imagined, and well expressed’(pp. 245–56). In his 1956 essay, ‘Graves and the White Goddess’, Jarrell remarks that while Graves’s poems are ‘in no sense the work of a great poet’, he is nonetheless a ‘fine poet’ who has become an ‘extraordinary one’.[3] What a difference fifteen years makes! Part of that change between 1940 and 1955 is surely due to the impact of The White Goddess – the effect of what Ted Hughes would later call the ‘prose precincts’ that ‘poems need’.[4]

The prominence and resonance of The White Goddess and its conception of the poet came at a cost, however. It has long been recognised that the daring and allure of the book became, as it perhaps remains, both an enabling portal and a problem for Graves’s ongoing reception as a poet: a touchstone and a stumbling block. By the 1950s, Graves was a mature poet, living out an ongoing commitment to his calling and working successfully as a novelist, lecturer and scholar-critic. While some reacted with delight to Graves’s articulation of the ‘Muse poet’, and its inflection of the way poetry (not just by Graves) could be read and conceived, many others balked at it, wanting none of what Donald Davie would dismiss as a ‘mythological Never-Never Land ruled over by goddesses, white and black’.[5] Here is John Fowles, in his journal in October 1957:

Graves [is] a major minor poet. What I don’t like about Graves is the mythification of all experience […] too much mythification, generalization. But these highest reservations apart, he is a fine, neat poet; there are one or two perfect things – ‘An English Wood’, ‘Full Moon’, ‘Ulysses’ – of their kind.[6]

Despite his criticism, it is striking that Fowles nonetheless composes his own micro-anthology of what he considers to be ‘perfect’ poems of their kind: a version of Graves that he wants to keep and promote.

Where, then, is Graves himself in all this, regarding reputation, standing and the place of the anthology in the culture of poetry? This is what he has to say in the foreword to Poems and Satires 1951:

Personally, I have little regard for posterity or, at least, make no attempt to anticipate their literary tastes. Whatever view they may take of my work, say a hundred years hence, must necessarily be a mistaken one, because this is my age, not theirs, and even with my help they will never fully understand it. Can I imagine myself sympathizing with their reasons for selecting this or that poem of mine to print in their anthologies? They may even choose to revive verses which, because I know they are in some way defective, I have done my best to suppress. I write for my contemporaries.[7]

Here Graves identifies the process of posterity in poetry with anthologising. The matter of anthologies had been on his mind at various points, as I address below; but notice how Graves raises the prospect of ‘helping’ future readers understand his age, only to dismiss the implication that he is, in fact, already guiding the reception of his poems. He knows he can’t control future tastes – and this touches a nerve with him, precisely over the control of his poetic oeuvre (or rather, his loss of control over it). That is a recurrent anxiety in Graves from the 1920s onwards, even as he adapts to new publishing conditions, and indeed tries to influence them. The microcosm of the poetry anthology, and the tensions and dilemmas of its role in literary culture, focuses contested claims as to the worth and character of the poetry that it gathers. The poet is both placed and displaced at one and the same time.

The Anthology as a Form

The word ‘anthology’ originates in English in the 1630s, from the Greek: literally a ‘gathering of flowers’ (anthos + logia), which envisions the poem as blossom, beauty, and possibly physic. The word itself carries a figurative weight absent from more neutral alternatives, such as ‘collection’, and draws immediate, if implicit, attention to the principles on which the flowers are picked. What is being selected, why, and by whom?

As Derek Attridge has observed, the origins and rise of the poetry anthology in its European contexts are tied to ‘the transformation of poetry to an art of writing and reading’: its transition, that is, from a characteristically oral form: a process hastened in Hellenistic Mediterranean culture, with a focal point in the great Library of Alexandria.[8] Attridge identifies the first poetry anthology, conceived as such, in the European tradition, as Meleager’s Garland, of the first century BC, which included work going back to the seventh century BC. This tradition culminated in the large Greek or Palatine Anthology of c. 980 compiled by a Byzantine scholar or scholars: an anthology of anthologies. The chronological and geographical range upon which these anthologies drew is striking: the anthologies emerge as a fusion of historical compendium, compilation based on form (especially the epigram), and what we might call taste or qualitative judgement. This new form, the anthology, produced fresh ways of presenting, collocating and experiencing poetry, and as Attridge points out, this new context, of putting different forms of artfully arranged language together, accentuated and (literally) made visible distinctive aesthetic dimensions in the poetry: formal characteristics and virtues that could be enjoyed and reread beyond single oral recitals (p. 75). The collection of many instances of many poets’ works also allowed readers and poets to conceive of an individual poet’s body of work collectively – hence the idea of gathering the disparate, smaller (epigrammatic, lyrical, elegiac) works not just of many authors, but of a single author, into an ‘anthology’: providing ‘an incentive to the Alexandrian writer to conceive of his own poetic output as a single whole’ (p. 76). On this analysis, the origin of the poetry anthology in Europe predates the single author collection, and perhaps even gave rise to it.

The fundamental issue remains: the principle(s) of selection. This (to adapt a phrase of Robert Frost’s) is where all the fun is. Despite calls over the years for anthologists to be ‘void of all prejudice’ (in the words of William Oldys, in The British Muse, an early national anthology (1738)), the fact of the matter is, as Clare Bucknell writes, ‘Impartiality and anthologising […] don’t mix’.[9] The poetry anthology is not a neutral space, and, as in literary criticism, any advocacy and conditioning of the reading of poetry through anthologising or editorial curation should not be disguised as such. An anthology is a contested site, and a point of contest within the culture.

Montaigne’s refreshingly honest remark – ‘I have gathered a posie of other men’s flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own’ – was used as a guiding principle (and title) by Field-Marshal Wavell, who in the middle of the Second World War (1941–43) published the poetry anthology Other Men’s Flowers, an extraordinary, quite fascinating and (if you’ll excuse the pun) disarming book – based, we are told, almost entirely on the poems that Wavell had by heart.[10] (Graves doesn’t make the cut, possibly because Wavell hadn’t learnt any of his poems by heart. Then again, Wordsworth and Tennyson don’t get a look in either.) It may have been a ‘purely personal anthology’, as Wavell puts it (p. 20), reflecting what he has found memorable, but this stakes claims of taste – implicitly or explicitly advocating for certain orders of poetry (however admirably wide his range is, in some respects). In the preface, for example, he says:

Practically all the verse in this collection is capable of being declaimed, it seems to me a function of poetry that it should be so. Poetry in its origins was certainly a declamatory art […]It is one of my charges against modern poetry that it does not easily lend itself to memorizing or declamation. (p. 22)

Here we have an honest intervention, based undisguisedly on a principled subjectivity. Whether the reader agrees with Wavell or not, it makes a contention; and in making contentions regarding poetry (we could say even in opposition to it: think of Plato, for example) we invest it with value and significance. There is something at stake.

The 1920s and the Poetry Anthology as a Culturally Contested Form, and a Form of Cultural Contest

There was certainly something at stake, for Graves, in the booming trade in poetry anthologies in the 1920s – the first period in which contemporary, living poets were anthologised together on a mass-market scale in Britain. This relatively new phenomenon prompted a significant intervention by Graves and Laura Riding, A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, in 1928. Helen Goethals, in a stimulating essay published in Gravesiana in 2013, identifies the new trend from 1921 onwards, pioneered by Secker and Methuen, that selected poems from existing books to make not a ‘conspectus’ of the poets’ own volumes – as their editor Edward Marsh had conceived of the Georgian Poetry anthologies – but ‘self-sufficient collections of poetry’ by various hands.[11] It is against trends in this kind of modern ‘trade anthology’ of contemporary verse written by living poets, that Riding and Graves rail.

The new style anthologies of the Twenties and Thirties sold extremely well: the anthology became the most popular and commercially viable way of publishing poetry to the reading public – and got into the education system (as they now remain in Britain, in specially compiled volumes, grouped somewhat oddly under titles like ‘Power and Conflict’, which our children study). These Twenties and Thirties anthologies often sought also to speak for, and hence partly define, the ‘modern’, and what ‘modern poetry’ might be – signalling that postwar sense of an irrevocable and fundamental break with prewar historical continuity that characterised this period. Aspects of this change were later discussed under the name of ‘Modernism’ – but the cultural shift was broader than that, and not quite as deliberate as the ‘-ism’ suggests. This was the period in which the past became a foreign country, in poetry, where they do things differently.[12] We’re still living with the effects of that schism, which Graves himself later identified as turning prewar poetry into a ‘museum vocabulary’, instead of a living, daily consulted resource.[13]

A major problem with the new anthologies, for poets, was that poets had little or no control over which of their poems appeared in these volumes. As Goethals points out, it was the appearance of just such an anthology in late 1921 that prompted T. S. Eliot to write to the Times Literary Supplement, objecting that anthologies of this kind might actually harm a poet’s reputation.[14] The next week, Graves joined in, agreeing and expanding on Eliot’s objections. I summarise here:

• ‘A poet’s capacities cannot in any sense be measured by one or two “anthology pieces”’: an implicit recognition that some might also now write in a particular ‘anthology mode’, lessening their poetic independence
• A poet may be tainted by association with weaker work by others
• Such anthologies may cause a drop in sales of single-author collections
• They might also aid chancers on the make, seeking to get their own name mentioned among choice examples of the living and the dead.[15]

This line of thinking fed into the Pamphlet Against Anthologies, seven years later. Graves and Riding attacked what they called ‘irresponsible’ anthologies: the ‘mere wanton rearrangement of poetry that has its proper place elsewhere, or nowhere at all’.[16] As Goethals puts it, Graves and Riding saw most of the new anthologies ‘as the wrong place to look for good modern poetry’.[17]

There’s some irony in the fact that, having had work in each of the last three (out of five) volumes of the Georgian Poetry anthologies edited by Marsh, Graves was a beneficiary of the new appetite for anthologies. The anxiety, though, was really over control: the poet’s work was now adrift in a medium over which their powers of curation, in relation to their own poems, were diminished. Too many variables could affect the reception-conditions of the poem.

As Goethals notes, the Pamphlet Against Anthologies was in its way a pioneering study of the form, which – together with A Survey of Modernist Poetry – was ‘part of a much longer struggle to capture the attention of what was termed the new reading public, those readers who, while becoming ever more numerous and literate, were also becoming ever more ignorant of, and even hostile to, poetry’ (p. 633). Graves and Riding were trying to reassert a degree of control in this culturally contested space, by intervening in and hoping to alter the direction of the poetry anthology as a phenomenon.

Goethals argues that the Pamphlet did in fact influence the practice of Michael Roberts, the editor of the anthologies New Signatures (1932), New Country (1933), and The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936) (p. 643), which represented new standards in the compilation and curation of poetry, on the ‘responsible’ model for which Graves and Riding advocated. Again, Graves the poet benefitted – he was represented in the highly popular and influential Faber Book of Modern Verse by thirteen poems, which was also the first publication of ‘To Bring the Dead to Life’ (Riding also made it in).[18]

If that was a triumph, however – and exerted an enlivening and clarifying influence on the history of the poetry anthology since – it was a qualified one. Eliot remained suspicious of anthologies: in a 1944 lecture, with the dispiriting title ‘What is minor poetry?’, he referred to the latter as ‘the kind of poetry that we only read in anthologies’.[19] The mere anthology-reader could not be a true lover of poetry, for Eliot. The danger was – or indeed, the modern fact might appear to be – that (in Goethals’s words) ‘the only form in which they [the public] were willing to read poets unknown to them was the anthology’ (Goethals, p. 644). Graves himself likewise remained sceptical of the value of anthologies. In one of his Oxford lectures he went as far to say that The Oxford Book of English Verse (edited by ‘Q’, Arthur Quiller-Couch) ‘contains few real poems’, and was merely ‘a useful museum of fashion. “How pretty, how quaint, how vulgar, how neat, how monstrous”, we should say as we read’.[20]

It could be said that with The Faber Book of Modern Verse, Graves and Riding won a tactical battle for their own poetry – but ultimately lost the strategic battle that they had enjoined for poetry in general. Here are a few words from John Hayward, one of the judges of the Festival of Britain Poetry Competition in 1951. In his introduction to the anthology of winning poems, Hayward lamented that the majority of entrants seemed to ‘rarely have read any poetry worth the name, or, if they had, were entirely unaffected by it’: ‘To all appearances the extent of their knowledge was confined to popular anthology-pieces, to hymn-books, and to dimly recollected set-passages from school primers […]it was disturbing to find such widespread ignorance of the nature of poetry and such technical incompetence’.[21] Setting aside that it is highly unlikely that any introduction to a prize anthology today would be so bracingly frank, Hayward presents an unsettling comment on the state of public engagement with poetry in Britain at that time – at least as refracted through the distorting lens of a large-scale open poetry competition.

Graves in Poetry Anthologies: Some Examples

I turn now to some examples of how Graves has been anthologised over the years. The poetry anthology has stayed with us – and Graves has been lucky enough, his work respected enough, to have a good showing through that history. Each of the examples that I’ve selected conveys a certain sense of Graves’s work, created by the choices the editors have made. It is perhaps hard for long-practised readers of Graves to assess the impressions given by micro-selections of his poetry, when they are familiar with the much larger body of his poetry – but it is, I think, instructive to do so.

I leave to one side the Georgian Poetry selections, with their particular contexts: suffice it to say that they established Graves as both a war poet and a ‘Georgian’ poet, during the Twenties – both epithets that he fairly soon wished to shake off as his thoughts turned to poetry more generally as an ideal, under the stimulus of Laura Riding. With the first of his selections from his own poetry, in 1926, he was actively configuring his poetic oeuvre and revising his record as a poet. His efforts at self-curation – and his pioneering interventions with Riding, through A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928) and A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) – had certainly paid off by the time the first of my examples, The Faber Book of Modern Verse, was published in 1936. Michael Roberts, the editor, had been paying attention; Graves, he says in his introduction to the anthology:

identified himself with that view of poetry which Laura Riding has increasingly emphasized – poetry as the final residue of significance in language freed from extrinsic decoration, superficial contemporaneity, and didactic bias.[22]

This genuinely takes Graves’s position (and Riding’s) seriously. Roberts goes on:

Robert Graves is, I think, a poet whose poetry is mainly verbal. That is to say, although there is often a visual picture corresponding to his poems, the effect of the poem depends upon the direct evocative effect of the words, not on the visual stimulus. (p. 23)

This nuanced critical observation shows again the kind of thoughtful, curatorial care in compiling the anthology that Roberts is remembered for (where he is remembered) – and this no doubt did Graves’s reputation no harm at all. His poems, views, and approaches were being set alongside what was presented as – and largely accepted as, in the popular consciousness – the leading edge of poetry in English. Graves had taken his place as a poet and serious thinker on poetry.

The Faber Book of Modern Verse ran through four editions over the course of the twentieth century. Here is the choice of Graves’s poems in the 1965 edition:

Quayside [title later changed to ‘A Former Attachment’]

O Love in Me [title later changed to ‘Sick Love’]

Lost Acres

The Bards

Flying Crooked

Ogres and Pygmies

On Dwelling

On Portents

To Bring the Dead to Life

To Juan at the Winter Solstice

In Broken Images

The White Goddess

This is a discerning selection – and remains so despite several of the pieces being carried over from Roberts’s initial choice. It conveys something of the range as well as the distinguishing characteristics and concerns of Graves’s poetry.

Graves also appears in a very different kind of anthology from 1936: Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes & Poems for the Young of All Ages, edited by Walter de la Mare. Here are the poems de la Mare chose for this extraordinary book:

In the Wilderness

A Frosty Night

Lost Love

‘In the Wilderness’, on Jesus and the scapegoat that followed him, in the desert – the musical qualities of which must have appealed to de la Mare’s ear – while rarely subsequently anthologised, retained a prominence in Graves’s oeuvre: it is the opening poem of the 1975 Collected Poems, the final edition of his work that Graves was able to oversee. ‘A Frosty Night’ is a curious – and again, rather de la Marean – piece, in the ballad-like obliquity of its quatrains. With ‘Lost Love’ (1919), Graves the love poet had certainly emerged.

Jumping on twenty years, to The Penguin Book of English Verse, John Hayward, its editor, presented his guiding principle as follows: ‘The chief, if not the only end of poetry, Dryden said, is to delight. It is with this end always in view that the following selection of English poetry has been made’.[23] His choice of Graves is:

Full Moon

Never Such Love

Here Graves finds his way into a selection of English poetry from 1557–1940 – a sign of his standing – and one of John Fowles’s choices, from his notebook entry of 1957, makes it in.

1962 was a significant year for Graves and the modern anthology – firstly, because of an anthology of that year that Graves’s poetry did not feature in, but in which he gets a significant mention: The New Poetry, edited by Al Alvarez, which became widely influential.[24] Alvarez says in the Prefatory Note that he regretted not being able to include Graves – along with Auden, MacNeice, MacDiarmid, Henry Reed and Patrick Kavanagh – because their ‘reputations were made before 1950’ – so couldn’t quite count as ‘the new’. Yet Alvarez credits Graves’s Good-Bye to All That (1929) with helping to break down the notion that the illusory insularity of Britain (or more especially England) could simply carry on as before, after the ravages of the First World War – having shown ‘perfectly how powerless the orthodox defences [the ‘stiff upper lip’] ultimately became under extreme conditions’.[25] He says of Graves that even after his recovery and adaptation to new modes of life, ‘he had to exile himself from England and erect the elaborate barricade of White Goddesses and classicizing through which his genuine poetry has only slowly and painfully filtered’ (Alvarez p. 26). What poems by Graves Alvarez would have chosen as ‘genuine’ I have not been able to ascertain: poems that, presumably, transcended the ‘gentility’ – an illusory complacency that things are much as they are wistfully imagined always to have been – that he wished modern poetry to get past. Here, Alvarez casts Graves as a kind of pathfinder beyond the ‘gentility principle’.

1962 also saw the publication of The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, edited by Kenneth Allott, in its second edition, the first having been published in 1950. Graves features prominently, a sign of the significance Allott grants him, together with Yeats, Eliot and Auden.[26] He says that ‘when a poet is represented by three or four poems I have not felt bound to choose his best work exclusively – sometimes it has seemed better to illustrate his development or his poetic variety’ (p. 18); Graves has six:

Warning to Children

Welsh Incident

Never Such Love

Lollocks

The Thieves

To Evoke Posterity

There’s ‘Never Such Love’ again, which Allott praises (together with ‘The Thieves’) as ‘love poems of a sort too truthful for the many to admire without misgiving’ (p. 128). Allott also refers to John Wain’s recommendation of Graves and Empson in 1950 as a counter to what was widely derided as the so-called ‘neo-romanticism’ of the late Thirties and Forties, ‘in the effort to get intelligence back into poetry’ (p. 35) – although he notes that the neo-romantics also claimed Graves as an influence: a mark of the doubleness (and desire to synthesise) characteristic of Graves’s poetry and criticism, as well as how pleasingly difficult it is to pin Graves down to easy critical categories. Wain had also lauded Graves and Empson because (as Allott says) ‘these writers were independent of ideological commitments’ (ibid). Allott praises Graves in high terms: ‘The poetry of Robert Graves is in some ways the purest poetry produced in our time, waving no flags, addressed to no congregations, designed neither to comfort nor persuade’ – and he singles out ‘Warning to Children’ and ‘To Evoke Posterity’ as ‘among Graves’s finest poems’ (pp. 127-28).

Moving on to 1967, his term as Oxford Professor of Poetry now over, there is evidence that Graves’s reputation is approaching its zenith. In Poetry 1900 to 1965, George MacBeth, its editor, has this to say, which is worth giving at some length:

Many critics would regard Graves as the greatest English poet now living and his reputation has steadily increased throughout his lifetime. I personally regard this judgement as too high, though his poetry is certainly important for its independence, consistency and formal variety. The key concept in Graves’s recent thinking is his dedication to the White Goddess, a symbolic and dangerous female figure who makes life worth living and poetry worth writing. The hard core of Grave’s poetry is, in fact, still about Love although he is now seventy. What is ultimately worrying about it is perhaps its absence of enough clues to its origin in his own life – there is something one feels a little too gentlemanly and civilised about his concealment of his tracks. Nevertheless, Graves has pursued his career as a poet over more years with more integrity and purpose than perhaps any other living English poet, and the attempt alone is an inspiration and example.[27]

That seems to sum up the view of many readers – and Graves’s peers in poetry – at this time. This anthology is also significant in that MacBeth gives a paragraph of comment to each poem that he includes, which can be unbuttoned: he says that ‘The Cloak’ ‘is about a sort of eighteenth-century James Bond’ (p. 135). On ‘Ogres and Pygmies’, appearing here as it did in The Faber Book of Modern Verse, MacBeth is driven to note, with admirable mildness, that Graves’s ‘main fault as a critic is a forthright, though in some ways an engaging, tendency to dislike all the established writers of the twentieth century, including his contemporaries and juniors’ (ibid). Here are MacBeth’s choices:

Ulysses

Welsh Incident

Ogres and Pygmies

The Cloak

With Her Lips Only

Lollocks

The Persian Version

The Face in the Mirror

Surgical Ward: Men

Not at Home

In The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes (1982), a justifiably influential anthology of the later twentieth century, poems are presented alphabetically, to mix up the poems and poets, and their times, among each other. These are what they choose from Graves (another good showing):

The Allansford Pursuit [Grave’s reconstruction of a seventeenth-century text]

Flying Crooked

It Was All Very Tidy

The Legs

Lollocks

Nature’s Lineaments

‘The Legs’ is a playful choice, out of all they could have chosen. In their sequel to this anthology, The School Bag (1997) – described by Heaney as ‘different from The Rattle Bag, less of a carnival, more like a checklist’[28] – they allowed themselves just one poem per poet, and they chose ‘Lost Love’ (1919): interestingly, not included in The Rattle Bag. The thought of having to choose just one poem from Graves’s work, for a ‘checklist’ of poetry in English, is a challenging one; a good case can be made for their selection.

In The Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Christopher Ricks (1999), Graves features well, numerically:

A False Report

Angry Samson

Love Without Hope

The Cool Web

Warning to Children

Welsh Incident

To Juan at the Winter Solstice

By now a few patterns have emerged – a few anthology favourites, perhaps – along with a curious choice for comparison in the first two poems: ‘Angry Samson’ is a retitling and light reworking of ‘A False Report’ of 1923. Ricks does not dilate upon this choice, and it is questionable whether the comparison rewards the heightened attention it demands.

In The Penguin Book of English Verse, edited by Paul Keegan (2000), poems are arranged by date of first publication by collection (or circulation) – the ‘anthology as chronicle’[29], in Keegan’s words – giving a kind of reader’s eye view through poetic history. While still wishing in some way to be representative, Keegan recognises that ‘Anthologies do no more than tell stories about the past and are themselves fictions, ideas of order’ (ibid). Here, Graves appears between 1925 and 1945, with again a good number of poems relative to others:

Love Without Hope (1925)

Sick Love (1929)

Warning to Children (1929)

It Was All Very Tidy (1929)

To Evoke Posterity (1938)

To Juan at the Winter Solstice (1945)

It is clear by this stage that certain anthology favourites are now established.

The vast Norton Anthology of Poetry (5th edition, 2005) seeks, say the editors, to be ‘a wide and deep sampling of the best poetry written in English’, principally as a ‘teaching tool’.[30] Here are the poems by Graves they select:

Love Without Hope (1925)

In Broken Images (1929)

Warning to Children (1929)

The Persian Version (1945)

To Juan at the Winter Solstice (1945)

The White Goddess (1953)

For the sixth edition, published in 2018,[31] ‘Welsh Incident’ and ‘Recalling War’ are included, while ‘Warning to Children’ and ‘The Persian Version’ have been removed.

One final example: a Penguin anthology, The Zoo of the New, edited by Don Paterson and Nick Laird (2017), aims to present (according to the blurb), poems that ‘feel utterly here and now in the 21st Century’. Paterson and Laird select ‘Sick Love’: a sound choice, I think – embracing a kind of existential horror in the name of existence itself – which in fact loops right back to The Faber Book of Modern Verse of 1936, where it was anthologised under its earlier title ‘O Love in Me’.

Anthologising Graves and the Ongoing Curation of Poetry

What observations, then, in light of this, might be made on anthologising, anthologising Graves in particular, and the ongoing curation of poetry?

a) Anthologising Graves, and its implications

The first thing to note is that Graves is one of the lucky ones. He appears both as ‘contemporary’ and ‘classic’ in these anthologies: you surely know that you are, in Keats’s phrase, ‘among the English poets’ if this is happening to you while you’re still alive. Among the moderns but established in the tradition: a recurring name wherever poetry in English is spoken of. Whatever Graves’s own misgivings about anthologies, they have played a significant role in the making and shaping of Graves’s popular and critical reception.

It is worth considering, too, which poems have recurred the most in this sample of anthology selections. These are:

To Juan at the Winter Solstice

Warning to Children [4 times]

Lollocks

Love Without Hope

Sick Love

Welsh Incident [3 times]

To Evoke Posterity

The Persian Version

Flying Crooked

Ogres and Pygmies

In Broken Images

It Was All Very Tidy

Lost Love [twice]

It is likely that readers of this list will be thinking: ‘yes, but there is also…’. Such doubts and/or affirmations highlight some key points: quite different, if related, versions of the same poet can emerge, from micro-selections; editorial, or curatorial work, in poetry and indeed any artistic context, is unbounded and always ongoing; and there can be no single ‘authoritative’ version of Graves (perhaps even textually, as he works on his poems across time): we, like the poet himself, all have our own versions of him, and these too are subject to change. The reader’s continuing relationship to Graves’s work, as to the work of any poet, is in the experience of encounter and dynamic relation. You never step into the same poem twice.

There is a clear analogy, in the act of editorial selection, to the role of the critic and criticism: presenting, that is, other ways of reading or attending to the poetry. This gives the process of selection and curation its creative dimension. The same can be said of the process on a larger scale, as in compiling a ‘Selected’. As Louis MacNeice remarked, poetry embodies ‘a complex of spiritual intimacies’,[32] so the task of selection will be just as intimate, and ultimately various and motile, rather than canonically fixed. It follows that the idea of the ‘canon’ itself – transposed onto literature from religious debates over textual authority – can never be the ideal model of literary custodianship it was once supposed to be, whatever its virtues in constructing shared frames of reference. It is far better to embrace the creative and critical dynamics of editorial activity, with its open invitation to keep responding afresh to the inexhaustible possibilities of poetry and literature.

b) Anthologies are not neutral

In the Introduction to his Penguin Selected edition, Paul O’Prey refers to ‘the natural selection process of literary history’.[33] But of course, that metaphor must include both the activity and contingency of human agency: anthologies of all kinds are, above all, human products. As Bucknell writes:

anthologies are compiled by real people, not ‘ideal’ figures, by editors and writers with human prejudices, interests, agendas. They exist not outside history, but in it, reflecting the ideas and priorities of their time, influencing patterns of taste, determining what’s available to be read and what isn’t, encouraging new and different kinds of reading publics to emerge. They seek, in some form or other, to make their mark on culture – to shape, whether briefly or enduringly, the society in which they are to be read. (Bucknell, p. 9)

Unsettling as the fact may be, received critical consensus, however vague, ill-defined, or indeed apparently certain – in part encouraged by repeated patterns in anthologies over generations – can obscure many dimensions of a single author’s work, including the most ostensibly familiar; and this is before we even stop to consider who and what has been overlooked in literature more generally. The processes of literary history themselves require constant vigilance from those invested in its importance. This is as exciting as it is challenging, because there is always more to be revealed than might appear at first glance, even to highly experienced observers.

c) Graves as his own anthologist and curator

If it remains true that, as Fran Brearton puts it, ‘Graves appears still to exercise an unusual degree of control over the terms of his own reception’,[34] then that is due in no small part to the fact that Graves was provoked, not least by the rise of the anthology in the Twenties that I’ve described, into a highly active curation of his own reputation. This activity started with his first Collected Poems in 1926, and lasted all the way up to 1965.[35] Throughout this time, Graves had not only sought to exclude whatever he subsequently decided had somehow falsified the poem (what he sometimes called ‘cheating’ for effect): he also helped to define the context of his poems, through his prose, both in and beyond the editions themselves. Graves’s practice and his reputation as a poet are intimately linked to his work as a critic, scholar, lecturer, novelist, and editor. He recognised from an early stage that poems do not necessarily make their own way, in and of themselves. Contexts matter; and the still common assumption that ‘quality will out’ – a confidence that work will somehow inevitably receive the recognition it is due – is at best naïve. There is perhaps a lesson for all poets there.

d) The challenges of anthologising Graves as microcosm of the challenges and dilemmas of anthologising in general

Anthologising Graves presents challenges and dilemmas common to anthologising in general. As in many things, Graves himself can assist here. In the Foreword to Collected Poems (1938), he wrote that his ‘health as a poet lies in my mistrust of the comfortable point-of-rest’.[36] This is a good point to bear in mind in conceiving of the poetry anthology and its possibilities, and the ongoing curation of poetry: a reminder that it should not aim at some point of finality, but ongoing life. That implies an embrace of contingency, variety, and the possibilities of continually refreshed perspective; and hence the importance and value of having multiple editors and editorial contexts, with their differing visions, affinities and emphases.

This idea and its consequent methods might also serve to loosen Graves’s poems from the posthumous grip of the poet’s own sense of himself: a Graves for different times, and different sensibilities, can be found and go on being found. Good poets tend always to transcend their own myth of themselves. The poet and the critic alike, Graves reminds his audience, should ‘question every word and sound and implication in a poem either read or written’.[37] The patterns of mind and feeling in his writings are characterised time and again by dilemma: that curious fusion of imaginative reach and rationalising bathos; the tension between poetry and ‘plainness’ (including his repeated suspicion of ‘art’); the impulse to reconcile the sexes on some new (yet perpetually elusive) terms; his hyperextended idealisation of the poet and the poet’s vision, but also something mistrustful of human (especially male) overreach and delusion, even in this; the sense, evident in the searching rhythms and curious recurrences of his verse, of an uncertainty in clarity, and a clarity in uncertainty. From the ongoing drama of these and other dilemmas throughout Graves’s poetry, editors might weave many patterns.

e) The ongoing role of the anthology

As for the anthology today, things have changed since Graves and Riding worried at the issue in the Twenties: in Anglophone cultures, poets are often glad to be in anthologies, not least because it gives their work some further exposure beyond their own volumes in an absurdly crowded agora.

It is ironic that in On English Poetry in 1922, Graves himself anticipated the marketing of the poetry anthology as a form of therapy – a practice currently widespread in the publishing industry: ‘Poetry as the Greeks knew when they adopted the Drama as a cleansing rite of religion, is a form of psycho-therapy[.…] A well chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders’.[38] This point is refracted in A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, where Graves and Riding suggest that it is the making of personal poetry anthologies that has the therapeutic effect.[39]

Whatever the prevailing fashions, however, as a form the poetry anthology remains filled with possibility, especially when freed from any duty to be ‘representative’: a task that, in truth, has always been impossible in anything other than a narrowly defined sense (and is surely even more so now). The anthology is at its best when it is pathfinding, and led both by enthusiasm and an articulated curatorial taste: when it presents a ‘vision’, which as A. K. Ramanujan has written, is ‘the special contribution of literature’ more generally.[40] As Graves writes in ‘From the Embassy’, the poet is ‘an ambassador of Otherwhere’ – and this can and should also be true of the editor, critic, curator, or anthologist. As Brearton observes, Graves was acutely aware of the ways in which a desire to appear ‘relevant’ to a contemporary appetite can in fact reveal ‘a deeply conventional subscription to collective ideology […] rather than an act of rebellion. The rebellious writer, for Graves, is naturally resistant to categorisation in the “now” of the “moment”, whenever that might be’ (p. 282).

The anthologist can and should be able to devise the terms on which they intervene, no less than the poet or other artist. The anthology can free itself of the expectations that often haunt the act of anthologising.

f) Everyone their own anthologist

Graves would probably agree with Elizabeth Bishop’s advice: don’t just read ‘2 or 3 poems each, in anthologies – read ALL of somebody’.[41] It is surely true that you cannot get full knowledge of a poet purely from anthologies. But it is also true that the act of anthologising – of curating poetry – free of obligation, involves fundamental questions around poetry and its contentions: how and why we read poetry, and the character of its value. An anthology should not pretend to settle but seek to provoke thought on such matters. With this in mind, it feels apt to conclude with one of my favourite bits of Gravesian advice: ‘everyone should make his own private collection of real poems, rather than rely on public anthologists’.[42]

Gregory Leadbetter is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University. His research and criticism focus on Romantic, twentieth century and contemporary poetry and its contexts, and the history and practice of poetry more generally. His book Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) was awarded the University English Book Prize 2012. His new collection of poetry is The Infernal Garden (Nine Arches Press, 2025).