The New Golden Treasury of English Verse [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION M l' y In poetry, as Thomas Hardy observed, is 'concentrated the essence j, ! ' ,, / / : of all imaginative and emotional literature', and in every age the poets ' have provided some of the most sublime expressions of Man's genius / , , i and some of the most profound insights into the nature of human experience. For most of us, our first awareness of the English poetic tradition comes firom exploring anthologies. For more than a century the character of English poetry anthologies has been moulded, directly and indirectly, and to a remarkable degree, by one man - Francis Turner Palgrave (1824-97), an exceptionally gifted Victorian man of letters who created The Golden Treasury, an anthology so distinctive that its influence has reached down to our own time. The Golden Treasury was first published in 1861. As the book's fiill title makes clear, Palgrave made his selection firom 'the best songs and lyrical poems in the English language', which he presented in four sections corresponding to what he considered to be the four poetic epochs firom the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. Within each section Palgrave arranged the poems in a 'poetically-effective order' shaped by 'gradations of feeling or subjert', rejecting a strictly chronological sequence since he believed it would inhibit his readers' enjoyment of the poems. The Golden Treasury quickly established itself as one of the most popular and most enduring of all anthologies; and it was subsequently reissued with additional poems chosen both by Palgrave himself and - after his death - by others, including Laurence Binyon and Cecil Day Lewis, who wisely remained faithful to Palgrave's original concept. Palgrave's influence was immense. Ironically, although Palgrave himself was well aware that his selection of songs and lyrical poems was not representative of English poetry as a whole, The Golden Treasury was soon accepted as a basic canon of English poetry, receiving the final seal of approval at the turn of the century, when Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch came to compile The Oxford Book of English Verse - surely the best-known and best-loved of all English anthologies. Acknowledging the extent to which The Golden Treasury had helped to form the poetic taste of his generation, Quiller-Couch followed Palgrave in restricting his choice to the 'lyrical or epigrammatic', though he, too, had sometimes to confer the honorary status of 'lyrical poem' on pieces which did not really fall within his terms of reference. Indeed, save that Quiller-Couch introduced the chrono-