As far as I know there are no plans to tax poetry, if so it will hit me hard as anthologies will doubtless attract the top rate.
Lord Wavell’s anthology, Other Men’s Flowers, is a favourite. It was published in 1944 when you’d have expected him to be busy at his day job, governing India. One of the criteria for his selection was that he had to know them by heart. If true, this is impressive but may also say something about how education has changed since his childhood. His favourites are Browning, Kipling and GK Chesterton. Tennyson and Wordsworth are excluded – because “they have never registered an impression on my memory, they seem to me to belong to a limbo which is earthy without being quite human and star-gazing without being inspired”. His section of war poetry is moving.
The Dedication is rather sweet: “To My Son who shares my love for poetry but thinks his father’s taste a little old-fashioned”. I am fortunate to have a First Edition, published by Jonathan Cape, described as “Book Production War Economy Standard, this book is produced in complete conformity with the authorised economy standards”. It’s a normal hardback although the pages are a little thin.
However, a more enjoyable anthology is The Dragon Book of Verse, published in 1935 by Oxford University Press. You must have the Oxford Blue hardback edition.
As you’d expect from a book originating at a boys’ prep. school, the selection is accessible, even low-brow; Tennyson, Wordsworth and PG Wodehouse (Good Gnus) all feature.
Now imagine you are in the mountains, the sun is setting, beneath you a waterfall spills into a lake and there is a ruined castle across the valley. Here is how Tennyson describes the scene.
The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes dying, dying, dying.
O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes dying, dying, dying.
O love they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field, or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow forever and forever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.
http://youtu.be/PWzRZP0S5ZA
I have always liked ” Other Men’s Flowers” but I find it hard to believe that Wavell really could remember all the poems in it notwithstanding how education may have changed since then. After all, it is 426 pages long. If one is talking of anthologies I also very much like the initial ( Quiller Couch)version of the Oxford Book of English Verse. For something more up to date I favour the Rattle Bag (ed Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney).I don’t think I have seen a copy of the Dragon Book since I left prep school c 1958 but just the name is very evocative .
Quiller-Couch is more or less forgotten these days. He was a giant in his day but his writing has not stood the test of time. The only short story of his that I remember with pleasure is about the Cornish, St Piran who was so vague that he allowed his church to become submerged in sand.
If you read my post about racing at Cheltenham, my host was your cousin John.
But a good anthologist.
Here is a link to Legends of St Piran.
http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/37525/