Edna Longley adopts a familiar embattled tone when she recognises, in her introduction to Poetry & Posterity, the unfashionableness of the latter term: "other words beginning with `post' have reduced its popularity and challenged its authority. According to some literary theorists, we live in a post-posterity era." Nevertheless, Longley has faith in "literature's own devices", and that it can safely be left to them, quoting with approval MacNeice's assertion that if poets do their "duty by the present moment, posterity can look after itself".
Criticism, however, is another matter. She affirms (again unfashionably) its continuing need to be rigorous and evaluative, and situates her own analysis between "soft" criticism on the one hand, and the zany excesses of academic-theoretical relativism on the other. On the depredations of the former she is merciless, examining its Hiberno-American incarnation with disabused lucidity and wit in "Irish Bards and American Audiences". "Yeats did not ask us to recruit a global fan-club for the national literature," she remarks dryly, and although the examples of enthusiastic, uncritical groupiness she quotes are amusing ("everyone has done terribly well, it's all absolutely marvellous"), her point is a serious one: as well as being bad for writers who may start believing their own hype, "pseudo-democracy may disguise the politics really at work."
Longley is acutely aware of the role of the critic in posterity's apparently neutral winnowing action, lamenting the sponsorship-deal mentality of American creative writing programmes and the (mostly American) academic critics who, like Greek gods, wield arbitrary clout. Where subject-matter is concerned, there are few surprises in this book. It contains essays on Edward Thomas, Louis MacNeice, Auden and Larkin. Longley's strategy is to highlight their continuing and adaptable relevance, which confirms her thesis about the essential irreducibility of good work: it is for the mercurial critic to shape-shift, to alter the angle of vision by which poets are seen.
Thus, in " `The Business of the Earth': Edward Thomas and Ecocentrism", Thomas emerges as an exemplary figure embodying a kind of "green" holistic consciousness, successfully evading the procrustean categories of "Nature poetry" and "Pastoral", in themselves critical corollaries of Marxist and Modernist preconceptions. There is something familiar about this. Throughout Poetry & Posterity, Longley conjures up binary structures (Celt/Saxon, soft/theoretical, Hughes/Heaney, MacNeice/Auden) only to dismantle them in favour of a textured dialectic combining a worm's-eye view of poetic process with what Wallace Stevens might more grandly have termed "the whole, the complicate, the amassing harmony". This, together with the seasoned rigour Longley brings to her subject and her consistently high pitch of intelligent scepticism, amounts to a kind of critical ethic.
In "The Millennial Muse", a mordant examination of the anthology bug, she is astringent about what she terms "the culturalist fallacy", recognising that "considerable metropolitan careers have been built upon perpetual marginality". Not unexpectedly, Michael Schmidt's Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (1999) comes off considerably better than Sean O'Brien's The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland After 1945 or Armitage's and Crawford's Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945 (both 1998) whose "right-on" pluralism gets right up Longley's nose. This is, after all, a book about posterity, and for a critic who prefers the long view, the wilful amnesia involved in ignoring contemporary poetry's taproot in pre-war literary culture simply won't wash.
She is suspicious of "multivocality" as its own justification, making the cautionary point that "the poetics of multivocality have no necessary connection with pluralist politics (multivocality in Eliot and Pound laments the death of authority)". The categories Longley invokes for anthologies, "epochal", "contemporary" or "new", are a source of much humour as well as illumination, but the essay pulls no punches in its unabashed prescriptiveness: "making an anthology is a form of criticism" and "it is the most aesthetically partisan anthologies that influence the practise of poetry".
So it is unsurprising that The Bloodaxe Book of Twentieth Cen- tury Poetry should incline more towards lean muscularity than flab. Probably all anthologies should contain some allusion to Marianne Moore's pointed epigraph "omissions are not accidents". In this case, the omissions include most English-language experimentalists in the Eliot/Pound line. There are no traces of H.D., Donald Davie, Roy Fisher, J.H. Prynne, or Thomas Kinsella. Basil Bunting is unignorable, although Longley does remark that her chosen extract, the first section of Briggflatts, is "the only stanzaic section". This is a clear indication of her emphasis on the well-made lyric, a bias to which Longley admits in her introduction: "Yeats's word `intensity' associates the 20th-century lyric with a special drive toward verbal and formal concentration."
For Longley, the patterns and formal structures of lyric poetry are bound up with a fundamental human need to impose order on the chaotic material of life. Since both world wars intensified that need in a unique way, Longley devotes much space to "war poetry" of one kind or another. A generous selection of Keith Douglas's amazing, eidetic poems vindicates Longley's evident decision to do each poet justice by including enough work to constitute a fair representation.
The resulting anthology is unapologetically spare and pedagogical in orientation. Anthologies can never be offence-free zones, but those inclined to take umbrage at Longley's exclusivity have no dearth of alternative millennial volumes at their disposal.
Caitriona O'Reilly's first collection, The Nowhere Birds, will be published in 2001