Anthology: An invaluable collection reflects the 20th century's radical re-envisioning of poetry's purpose.
Anthologists, chided the critic F.R. Leavis in his New Bearings in English Poetry, "make the most extravagant claims on behalf of the age". His was a criticism aimed at those who encouraged, through praise and publications of equally voluminous proportions, the 19th-century explosion in the type of poetry that Leavis abhorred: poetry of a dulled, disconnected consciousness, concerned only with artificially "poetical" subjects - birds, flowers, dew, love - and incapable of interesting that vital demographic, "the intelligent". Finding a way out of this morass was "a desperate matter" in Leavis's view, and his relief at the path opened up by the work of T.S. Eliot practically radiated from the pages of his 1932 book. If anyone could save poetry from those extravagant anthologists, with their shortcuts, their generalisation, their anaesthetic for the trials of writing poetry that was truly "of the age", Eliot could. The age he would give birth to could.
In Jon Cook's ambitious collection of key critical and theoretical texts on 20th-century poetry (both pre- and post- the actual advent of Theory in the 1960s), that age itself becomes the anthology. Distance, however, renders the caution issued by Leavis no less germane. When the age that an anthologist sets out to encompass is so broad, is witness to such stark diversity, both of poetry and of theory, as the period which Cook attempts here to encompass - from Yeats's 'The Symbolism of Poetry' in 1900 to Helen Vendler's 'Soul Says' from 1995, with texts from more than 70 others in between - the risk of making "extravagant claims" gapes like a trap. To attempt any sort of uniting vision, even in terms of the 20-year periods into which Cook carves the theoretical century, of the positions represented by writers as different as those gathered, for example, in the section 1920-40 - Leavis, Lorca, Benjamin, Frost; Valéry and Breton; I.A. Richards and the Russian poet Mayakovsky - would be senseless.
It's a relief, then, to discover Cook to be the sort of anthologist who acts not to force texts into a predetermined relation, but rather to introduce them to one another, and to surrender overarching vision of the results to the reader, who makes through them a subjectively chosen path.
Certainly, Cook sketches the outline of his own way through, in an engaging, wide-ranging introduction which puts flesh on the theoretical bones of modern poetry - theories of metre, object, language, time - even as it steps back from technique to examine the intellectual and moral backdrop of the 19th century. He is clearly, though, more fluent in some theoretical fields than in others: the observations which touch on gender politics, for example, come across as limited and overly accepting - must the similar statements of Pound and Mina Loy on the personal intimacy of rhythm represent some kind of equality of the sexes? Could the equality not, rather, be of the emphases of poets?
But in the main, Cook's ideas are stimulating, especially when they underscore how paradoxical directions are at play in theories of modern poetry. This is so not just in a broad sense - the conflicting positions of Olson and Adorno, for example, on the politics of the lyric genre, or of Pound and (Amy) Lowell on the Imagist poem - but also, and more valuably, in individual cases. Pound's thinking on rhythm, for example, was "not exactly contradictory", but visibly, and irresolvably, torn between an inner and an outer source - the poet's individuality and the sequence of the musical phrase. The uneasy marriage, in theory, of impersonality and individualism is also well probed, and Cook subtly pinpoints a prevalent tendency, in writing about modern poetry, to think in metaphors as much as in definitions and concepts - looking through the texts, we find it in Rilke's "space", Marinetti's "machine", Lorca's "demon", Genette's "dreaming" - and leaves it to the reader to judge if this represents a frustrating vagueness or a liberating creativity.
It is for the reader, too, to judge how the metaphor Cook himself gives to the change wrought in poetry by modernity - "neither reform nor renewal is at issue," he says, "but revolution" - is borne out by the disparate readings gathered here, some of them familiar (Yeats's 'The Symbolism of Poetry', Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' and Heaney's The Redress of Poetry), others more obscure (Khlebnikov's 'On Poetry', Enzensberger's 'Modest Proposal') and one translated by Cook himself, (Césaire's 'Poetry and Knowledge'). Cook's is a claim, it becomes clear, which is not extravagant - everywhere in these meditations, from Freud's theory of creative writing as daydreaming, through Jakobson's "poetic function", to Milosz and his daring to hope, is the smack of upheaval, of unorthodoxy, of a radical re-envisioning of poetry's purpose, its possibilities, and its politics.
But revolution has, too, a second meaning; to revolve is to turn about a fixed point, to take a journey which ends, ultimately, where it began. And it's this less decisive identity, this trait of recurrent searching, of constant striving, which loops a loose chain of unity around Cook's selection. Because what emerge from a journey through these writings are questions about modern poetry - about its relation to tradition, about the value it places on its reader, and on empathy with that reader, about the conflict between the poet's self and the poem's form (though Cook's representation of the confessional movement is, it must be said, scant). Theory arises in the acts of reading and comparison, says Cook in his introduction; what we learn from this superb collection - intended as a textbook, but invaluable to all readers of poetry - is that poetry's theory lies in the questions for which we may not find answers.
Belinda McKeon is a journalist and critic
Poetry In Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000 Edited by Jon Cook Blackwell, 648pp. £19.99