Poetry Without Palgrave

A few years ago, as my wife and I were leaving a restaurant in Newburyport, Massachusetts, she noticed a flyer on a bulletin board advertising a “Poetry Appreciation Day”. This event was to be a gathering of poetry lovers at the town hall in Newburyport, the following month. Anyone who cared to could read their favorite poem out loud before the gathering, and explain what importance the poem had for them.

My wife urged me apply to be a reader at the gathering. “You like poetry”, she said, “and you would enjoy talking about one of your favorite poems.” She was right, and I applied to be a reader and was accepted.

A month later, I found myself sitting on a stage in the auditorium of the Newburyport town hall with about a dozen other people who were going to read their favorite poems. I was one of only two adults on the stage; the rest were high school students. Sitting next to me on my left was a girl who appeared to be asking herself “How the hell did I get myself into this?” I asked her what poem she had chosen to read — I didn’t recognize the name of the poem or author that she said —and I told her that she was going to be great. She did not appear to believe me.

Whatever qualms the young poetry lovers were feeling, they read their poems with conviction and gusto. Only one of them read a poem by a poet of whom I had heard, though; this poem was by Constantine Cavafy. The rest of the poems were free verse, and personal — outpourings of feelings that had not been submitted to the discipline of art. Or maybe these poems bore the marks of art, and the genre was simply too strange to me for me to perceive it.

It was clear to me after the event that the new generation of poetry lovers is unacquainted with the work of Francis Turner Palgrave, the friend of Tennyson and compiler of the anthology known as Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, originally published in 1861. Palgrave included in his anthology only short lyric poems — Lycidas is one of the longest poems in the book — and no poems by then living authors. Palgrave’s selection was extremely influential on the practice of English language poets up until recently. It was one of the books that well educated English soldiers took with them into the trenches of World War I, and in many cases their “war poetry” is in fact a dialog between Palgrave and the realities of the war. Robert Frost read his copy of Palgrave so often that he had to have it rebound.

Palgrave’s Golden Treasury has never been without its detractors. William James said that it was more like an aviary than a book. The poets whose work it enshrines, some complain, are almost all men. But Palgrave’s taste was sure — at least it agrees with, or has formed, modern taste — and there are few pages in the book that a sensitive reader would want to tear out and submit to the shredder.

This book, as I saw, made no appeal to the young poetry lovers sitting on the stage with me.

The poem that I read was “Here Lies a Lady” by John Crowe Ransom, a formal poem in regular meters. The poem is about the death of a young wife and mother after “six little spaces of chill and six of burning.”. After I read the poem, I explained that I liked it because I, like Ransom, can be made to feel uncomfortable by too direct expression of emotion. Ransom, it has often been said, defended himself against a natural inclination to the pathetic by creating an elaborate, mock pedantic, ironic style that seems to say “I’m not really greatly moved,” his denial intensifying the emotion in the poem. (Randall Jarrell said that Ransom’s style works well except when he is not feeling much emotion to pretend not to be feeling.)

The poem:

Here lies a lady of beauty and high degree.
Of chills and fever she died, of fever and chills,
The delight of her husband, her aunts, an infant of three,
And of medicos marvelling sweetly on her ills. 

For either she burned and her confident eyes would blaze,
And her fingers fly in a manner to puzzle their heads—
What was she making?  Why, nothing; she sat in a maze
Of old scraps of laces, snipped into curious shreds—

Or this would pass, and the light of her fire decline
Till she lay discouraged and cold as a thin stalk white and blown,
And would not open her eyes, to kisses, to wine;
The sixth of these states was her last; the cold settled down.

Sweet ladies, long may ye bloom, and toughly I hope ye may thole,
But was she not lucky?  In flowers and lace and mourning,
In love and great honour we bade God rest her soul
After six little spaces of chill, and six of burning.

Ransom said that as he wrote the third stanza, his cheeks became wetted.

As I read this poem to my audience, I sensed that Ransom’s little fable about the death of a wife and mother was holding its attention. Whether they saw the poem’s application to their own lives — that everyone’s life is six little spaces of chill and six of burning — I do not know. That is an application that only readers are likely to make who have read some of the older poetry, such as the poetry that Francis Palgrave selected for the delight and instruction for us, his posterity.