The controversy continues regarding The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove. The barest outline of the issue is as follows: Helen Vendler, in the New York Review of Books, reviewed the anthology negatively, citing, among other points, a selection skewed in favor of African-American poets at the expense of dead while males like Wallace Stevens. This prompted a letter in response from Dove accusing Vendler, among other things, of “barely veiled racism.” The blogosphere has lit up with the quarrel, with some decrying the anthology’s omissions (Ginsberg, Plath) and others defending Dove’s choices (and citing some underhanded tactics by HarperCollins that made it prohibitive to reprint some, but not all, of the poets that ended up being omitted).
The quarrel as a whole needs to be placed in context of anthologization itself. There are intensely personal anthologies with universalizing titles, like Mark Strand’s 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century. Then there are gender- or race-oriented anthologies that declare themselves as such in their titles, like The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature.
In the case of a book like The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, however, the expectation is that of a scholarly anthology. Perfect objectivity is inherently impossible. Universal inclusion is likewise impossible (and would defeat the purpose of an anthology). But the ideal is something that approaches objectivity: a reflection, not just of the editor-poet’s opinion of “good” or “great,” but the scholar-poet’s assessment of the art, taken as a whole.
Allow me an example to illustrate what I mean by this. Let’s say I despise Beat poetry. In my own hypothetical ethnically-oriented anthology, let’s call it The Norton Anthology of Indian-American Literature, I am free (if not obligated) to exclude the Beats. In my personal anthology with a universalizing title, let’s call it The 100 Most Beautiful Poems of the Twentieth Century, I am free to exclude the Beats. But if I were ever invited to edit a Penguin, Norton, or Oxford anthology of 20th century American poetry, in its unqualified entirety, for use (presumably) as a classroom text, I would have a scholarly obligation to include the Beats. The Beats, like them or not, were there. Their presence cannot be elided without squandering the scholarly integrity of the anthology.
The problem with Dove’s anthology, even accounting for the issue with reprint fees, is that its title is at odds with its nature. An anthology in which Melvin Tolson is generously represented, W. H. Auden relatively diminished, and Sylvia Plath obviated qualifies itself as a personal one. Dove herself might agree with this. Hers is a personal anthology with a scholarly title.
In this case, I suspect the mislabeling has been carried out intentionally, in the spirit of revisionism. The goal is not an admittedly imperfect objectivity. The goal, with this title in place, is the pretense of objectivity. This pretense is necessary so that the relative representations of Tolson, Stevens, and Plath can carry authority. There is a limit, however, to how much reconfiguration is acceptable; at some point, the volume comes to seem biased to the point of scholarly unreliability. The title itself takes on the air of a strategem. To modify a phrase from a dead white male (Robert Frost), this selection has designs upon us.
The focus of a scholarly anthology is not simply the inflation or deflation of reputations. The inflated contemporary reputation of a Ginsberg is part of the history of 20thcentury American poetry; you cannot understand the subject without him. Tennyson is out of favor among most practicing poets today in a way that Hopkins is not, but it would be an odd anthology of Victorian verse that gave Tennyson two pages and Hopkins twelve. A scholarly anthology, I would like to think, attempts an assessment based on criteria that include but are not limited to the editor’s personal tastes, artistic influences, and affiliations.
In the end, though, the scholarly integrity of this volume was the responsibility of the publisher. The scholarly title, I suspect, must sell more copies than a universalizing or overtly circumscribed one. Dove’s anthology is personal and at times polemical; if either she or her publisher, or ideally both, had packaged the contents accordingly, much of this brouhaha might have been avoided. Bad publicity is better than no publicity, though: Given the press that this anthology is receiving, I wonder whether the brouhaha itself might have been the publisher’s goal. This anthology may well end up a publishing coup—one that comes, unfortunately, at Dove’s expense.
Amit Majmudar is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist and an award-winning poet whose work has been featured in The Best American Poetry 2007, The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry magazine. His first poetry collection, 0°, 0°, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2009, and a novella, Azazel, was serialized in The Kenyon Review. Partitions, a novel about the India/Pakistan border, came out in 2011 from Metropolitan Books. A second book of poems, Heaven and Earth, was also published by Story Line Press in 2011.