Penguins for Millions

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 901, 9 November 1956, Page 12

Penguins for Millions

THE PENGUIN BOOK OF ENGLISH VERSE, edited by John Hayward; Penguin Books, 4/6. THE PENGUIN STORY; Penguin Books, 1/-.

(Reviewed by

lan A.

Gordon

their coming-of-age with a series of anthologies of first importance to the general reader and the student of English literature. A five-volume anthology of English prose from the 16th to the 19th century (totalling some 1400 pages), with the emphasis on_ the normal prose of each period-and not simply on purple passages-is perhaps the most exciting of the coming-of-age publications, and at Penguin prices it represents an amazing bargain. More interesting for the general reader is their newest collection of English verse. It is not recognised by many readers of poetry that anthologies go out of date, and this inevitable dating accounts for much of the difficulty that each new generation of poets encounters when they try to find an audience. For all but a tiny minority anthologies of poetry (rather than complete editions of poets) represent not merely our introduction to poetry but what we continue to read and enjoy. Our taste is formed for most of us by our first anthology*and our first enthusiastic schoolteacher at about the fifth-form level. When we leave school, if we continue to enjoy poetry, we tend to react favourably to the kind of poetry we have already absorbed. The critical pattern has been formed. Anything other is "modern poetry" and incomprehensible, At least two generations had their taste moulded by Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Poetry for them had to be serious in subject, sensuous and evocative in imagery, lyric in form. The "modern poetry" that broke away from Palgrave’s pattern was Kipling’s, and Kipling has had a hard fight to be accepted as a poet. The readers in the early part of our own century had their taste formed by Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse. Poetry had to be lyrical, romantic in tone, often weakly sentimental in content. Quiller-Couch’s choices as he came near his own time strike a present-day critic as thoroughly second-rate-read the Oxford Book backwards from the last page and you will not find a really good poem until you come to Keats. With a_ reading public brought up on Quiller-Couch, it is little wonder that T. S. Eliot in the twenties could find only a minority audience. 5 The Penguin Book of English Verse will, of course, go out of date as its predecessors have done. But it does represent the best of contemporary taste in poetry. It includes, as it should, the great things of the Elizabethans and the Romantics. It includes, as recent years have taught us, the Metaphysicals. But it goes further. It has an excellent selection of the till-recently neglected 18th century poets, those admirable Augustans whom the Romantics damned as writers of an age of prose. It has, within the limits of space, the major moderns, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Thomas. And it includes what Palgrave and Quiller-Couch neglected, American poetry. To miss out poets like Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost from the canon of English verse is today an admission that you do not know your business. co: BOOKS celebrate

Anthologies have their drawbacks. They are only samples, and samples chosen by somebody else. But they are a necessity for the general reader and the younger student..Anyone who reads and enjoys the new Penguin anthology will have a repertoire of admirable poetry at his command-and a pretty fair chance of understanding and enjoying the poetry of the next twenty years. The Penguin Story is, of course, advertising; and normally ‘I would object to paying even a shilling for a firm’s advertisement. But the history of Penguin publishing, which has never compromised on its high standards, never descended to vulgarity to stimulate its mass-appeal, has consistently and deliberately offered nothing but the best in contemporary and ancient writing, is more than the story of a firm of publishers. It is perhaps the completest answer to those pessimists who bewail the educational standards of the Eng-lish-speaking peoples. Uneducated people don’t buy Penguins. And Penguins sell by the million.