How lucky the students at Boston University are. At other universities, a complete database of English poetry would mean a CD-Rom; in Boston they've got Christopher Ricks. In his many books, from Keats and Embarrassment to Essays in Appreciation, he has shown a grasp of English poetry scarcely matched by anyone since his great mentor William Empson. Ricks is the sort of editor who can take an eight-line poem by T.S. Eliot and find allusions in it to Henry James, Longfellow, Gautier, Pound, Milton, Browning, Clough, Bertrand Russell, Shakespeare and Byron. An annotated edition of his new Oxford Book of English Verse would presumably put paid to those rainforests once and for all.
If the English canon means anything today, it means the collection of authors likely to appear in a book such as this. There are 822 poems by almost 250 writers from Chaucer and Dunbar to Hughes and Heaney, not counting Anon. His choice of Shakespeare sonnets or Keats Odes may not start any arguments, but Ricks doesn't limit himself to risk-free timeless favourites. Only the most encyclopaedic (Ricksian) reader will fail to find something new among the dozens of lesser but still worthy lights, from William Alabaster and Caroline Oliphant to Winthrop Mackworth Praed and Cosmo Monkhouse. Such was my ignorance of Irish poet James Henry (1798-1876) that I found myself wondering if he wasn't a typo for Henry James. His "Another and another and another" uncannily prefigures Samuel Beckett's poem "They come" and a famous passage in Watt. "They come" isn't included here, but three other poems of Beckett's are: "Roundelay", "Something there" and "What is the word". Not an Irish poet and not to be confused with our Paul Durcan-quoting former president is Mary Robinson (1758-1800), one of 29 women included by Ricks, as against a paltry nine by Dame Helen Gardner in the last Oxford Book of English Verse in 1972. He's no tokenist, either: Christina Rossetti gets all of sixteen pages compared to Yeats's six, with most of them devoted to that most unselfconsciously obscene of poems "Goblin Market."
An eye-opening feature of the anthology is its use of variant texts. Yeats's "The Sorrow of Love", for instance, is given twice, in the 1892 and 1925 texts: of the seventeen adjectives in the first version only three make the cut second time round. As to the wisdom of claiming Yeats, Phillis Wheatley or Roy Campbell for an anthology of English Verse, Ricks's defence is to use political independence as a cutting-off point. The logic of this is not always clear. Scotland still isn't independent but I don't see how this makes "The Twa Corbies" any more English. Equally, when Ricks errs on the side of generosity, it is to indulge whimsically English middlebrows such as Frances Cornford, E.C. Bentley and assorted other light versifiers. Reviews of anthologies often come down to head-counts of who's in and who's out, but this Oxford Book provides an example of a third category: in/out, as represented by Patrick Kavanagh. Ricks wanted to include four poems by Kavanagh, but was prevented by a dispute between the poet's brother and his estate. Happily his enthusiasm for Kavanagh's contemporary Austin Clarke (seven poems) is hampered by no such obstacle.
The soul-searching involved in deciding who gets more space, Cowley or Crashaw, Fulke Greville or Lord Herbert of Cherbury, shouldn't be underestimated, but nothing compares to the contemporary end of the scale for high-voltage divisiveness. Ricks ruthlessly short-circuits the argument by stopping at Seamus Heaney. The closer he came to the present day, of course, the more uncomfortably close (for his publishers) he would have got to the axed Oxford Poets list, though three living Oxford casualties make it in (Thomas Kinsella, Charles Tomlinson and Peter Porter).
"Let us offer our pinch of dust all to this God,/And grant his reign over the entire building", William Empson writes of a tribal fetish in "Homage to the British Museum", one of his seven poems included here. Ricks's editorial reign over his vast kingdom is just as confident: this is a book that deserves to gather plaudits, not dust. Whatever the geographical quibbles over his title, Ricks has restored at least some of its glory to that ragged entity, the canon. Perhaps for his next performance he'd consider doing the same for poetry after Seamus Heaney?
David Wheatley is a poet and critic