Judging by poets listed at the top of this thread, I am sure there will be many satisfying poems within the pages of this anthology. I am afraid I am not going to buy a copy, however. I already own too many poetry books, and there are other kinds of books I want to give time to, as well. (And there are, of course, more important things to engage with than poetry.)
In any case, I confess to being somewhat put off by some aspects of this paragraph—the word “Extreme”, for instance. It may be that I am constitutionally averse to anything that looks “extreme”, and especially to anything that bills itself as such. A deliberate provocation perhaps? Or a kind of slogan (from the Irish for “battle-cry”)? Be that as it may, the term brings to mind “extreme sports”, activities whose participants revel in exposing themselves to high degrees of physical danger and which most of the rest of us would regard as utterly foolish. That cannot, of course, be what was intended here. Cinna may have been torn for his “bad verses”, but I find it hard to believe that anyone whose lines appear in these pages is likely to face a similar threat. To the extent that the term “extreme” implies the overcoming of great challenges, I am not sure what the challenges are in this case. Poets have for centuries composed verse that complied with whatever the evolving metrical norms happened to be in their age. Some did it well, some badly; some wrote fluently and with ease, some only with much labour; but I would not describe any of this as “extreme”. Of course, the norms have never been static, as George Saintsbury recognized long ago and as Martin J. Duffell’s excellent A New History of English Metre (Modern Humanities Research Association, London, 2008) incisively confirms. I am not sure Shakespeare’s verse in his later plays would meet the standards of “extreme formalism” outlined here—nor, of course is there any reason why it should have. Then there is the perhaps unresolved case of Donne, whom (according to Drummond) Jonson thought “deserved hanging” “for not keeping of accent”. Curiously, a few lines later in Drummond’s recollections, he reports Jonson as cursing “Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets, which he said were alike that tyrant’s bed, where some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short”. So much for “extreme formalism”.
Of course, pace Jonson, choosing to box oneself into a set of tight rules, as those of us who have from time to time done so, can lead to unanticipated inventions—I feel sure Jonson knew this, despite his comment about Petrarch—but at this point I am struck by the moralizing tone of the paragraph. Words such as “regularity that restricts exception”, “impeccably” and “pure” lend colour and weight to superficially less moralizing terms like “adhere to”, “consistent”, “exceptions” or “then rarely”. They also make the concessions to “colloquial and regional pronunciation” sound patronizing. What is more, the “programme” also sounds oddly fearful.
Despite what will no doubt strike some as cavils, my congratulations to all those Spherians whose work was included in this anthology is perfectly warm and genuine.
Clive
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