POETRY: 'Anthologies are to poets as the zoo is to animals." So said the American poet, David Antin, thereby raising the question, what kind of zoo is this? Do the animals confront us for weekend entertainment or for serious instruction?
Are they are set up for coerced schoolchildren or for ladies in hats/gentlemen in spats? How does Michael Schmidt cage his frisky charges? Do his arrangements create an environment in which they can demonstrate their paces, or do they leave us worrying that they look more dead than alive?
The present volume is part of a projected four-volume guided tour of English poetry. The first volume reached 1500; the present volume continues it to 1700. Each volume divides into two parts, the first made up of potted history; the second of selected poems. In the present volume, the history part follows a simplified version of a narrative invented in the 1770s by Thomas Warton - Tottel's Miscellany, Petrarch comes to England, Elizabethans, Metaphysicals, etc - with collaborating or competing writers acting out the drama of the island's story in a late Victorian mood. Ben Jonson sets up a singing school, in the face of which Donne and Bacon are restless sceptics, but Herrick and Herbert do their own quiet pastoral-prayerful thing while others become either eccentric or profane.
The anthology-part also sticks to the tried and trusted, the highest common denominator of other anthologies, although longer poems such as Spenser's 'The Faerie Queene' and Milton's 'Paradise Lost' get shredded, chunks of the Authorised Version are inserted on the Bible-as-Literature principle, the Americans Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor are included on the ground that they were born in England. Thus, with the insertion of some translations and women poets, the animal houses are arranged in a way determined by our forefathers and an enthusiastic keeper urges us to discern the working of nature's grand design.
If this is the formative experience you think you need, you get your money's worth but you might prefer something different. A measure of what you do not get can be gained by comparing a standard student anthology. Thus, volume I of the latest, seventh edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature costs 50 pence more in paperback and £6.50 more in cloth, for which you receive almost three times the amount of material, from Skelton to Dryden, within nearly five times as many pages overall. You get more poems, more authoritative texts of poems, more specific guidance on how to read them, more up-to-date suggestions for further reading, you get appendixes on political and social history, terms for critical analysis, and so on.
You can read the whole of Book I of 'The Faerie Queene', as well as full selections from Books II and III, and 'Paradise Lost' complete. You can read a wider selection of poems by women writers that have been rediscovered during the past 20 years. You can compare the Authorized Version with other translations and alongside other religious prose.
The only reason why you might not make the obvious choice is that the Schmidt volume appears less superficially intimidating and more suitable for a gift. The paper is thicker, the pages without notes look as if they could be read for simple enjoyment, the dust-jacket tells you the contents are "wonderfully entertaining and instructive." Do not be deceived: once you get into the book it is a heap of problems. For example, the chapter on Shakespeare's sonnets opens as follows: "When drama began to be printed, blank verse was an ugly medium. Printers did their best to set it out prettily but got little enough thanks for their labours. For reasons not wholly unconnected with this, some early publishers harboured bad feelings about William Shakespeare, about his work and the way in which it broke upon the world. Their resentment had little to do with the man himself, who was born in the same year as Marlowe yet somehow seemed his junior and his apprentice."
The tone is confident but, if you can work out what this paragraph means, it could be untrue.
The story of poetry is a complicated business and whether literary history is still possible is a topic for debate. Anthology-making is mixed up with the business of canon formation and is equally problematic. The questions involved have to be taken on board, not dismissed with a nod towards the critical pundits of a conservative poetry magazine.
An anthologist of genius might be able to ignore the dull stuff that is churned over in universities - someone like Geoffrey Grigson would have discovered poems we never realised were there and set the poems we know in a fresh light, made us see and think anew - but Schmidt's book gives a dull setting to brilliant poems, although he is a poet and although he works in a university.
J.C.C. Mays is Professor of English and American Literature at UCD
The Story of Poetry: Volume Two: English Poets from Skelton to Dryden. By Michael Schmidt. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 696 pp. £25