The
Top Ten Poets
(in English)
Since my reading
of The Top 500 Poems (Columbia University Press, NY, 1995,
ed. William Harmon) collided with my wife's remark, "Perhaps anthologization
is the best test of a good poem," I have, loosely based on the book,
been thinking about a list of the "Top Ten Poets."
Harmon purports
to include those poems in English most anthologized -- a fairly conservative
coin of the literary realm and one perhaps least likely to suffer
quick devaluation.
And may I say
in praise of this volume that discovering Poe's "The Bells," the most
onomatopoeic poem in the language, made the book eminently worth the
price.
Anyway, in the
wake of my wife's comment, I took up my coverless, dog-eared copy
of Harmon's thick (1076 pp.) paperback to do a simple page count as
a screening device for detecting major poets. Only nine have more
than 20 pages in the anthology (curiously matching the number of muses).
This includes none, of course, still living, nor any women. Here's
a list of the top twenty in terms of total pages garnered from The
Top 500 Poems:
1) Coleridge
(36)
2) Keats (32)
3) Donne (31)
4) Shakespeare (29)
5) Wordsworth (28)
6) Eliot (27)
7) Yeats (25)
8) Blake (24)
Tennyson (24)
(After this
it gets dicey.)
10) Marvell
(17)
11) Whitman (16)
12) Dickinson (15)
Frost (15)
Hardy (15)
Pope (15)
Milton (15)
Shelley (15)
18) Hopkins (14)
19) Dryden (13)
Stevens (13)
That Chaucer
places only his "General Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales
in the book, a total of two pages, I think a great convenience, since
he composed his verse before the common tongue had completely settled,
and also because he could as easily be described a novelist -- in
that he wrote at a time when prose and poetry differed much more distinctly
in their uses. Any tenured English professor worth his salt would
no doubt lobby for Chaucer's inclusion in the top ten on merit, but
it's easier to ignore an author who wrote in Middle English than make
the necessary allowances for any fair comparison. For operational
purposes, however, can we just say Geoffrey Chaucer is the greatest
poet in Middle English and leave it at that?
That said, why
Shakespeare doesn't rank first by this method should be obvious: his
plays are not excerpted; only songs from them qualify for inclusion.
Shakespeare is that rarest of authors who dominates two genres, forcing
Harmon to narrow his definition of poetry by excluding some of the
best in the language, because it occurs in dialogue within the larger
context of a drama. Besides, picking out Shakespeare's best blank
verse from his plays would be, perhaps, more daunting a task than
assembling an anthology of anthologies.
More interesting,
why does Coleridge rank first? Mainly because of the "Rime of the
Ancient Mariner," which, if he had done nothing else, would have secured
him poetic immortality: it also takes up twenty-five pages. His additional
pieces are somewhat longish as well, like "Dejection: An Ode," a nice
confessional poem about a man battling clinical depression without
the advantages of modern psychopharmacology. At the very least, given
his numbers, I don't think it fair to think of Coleridge as a "failed
genius," rather one whose production was cut short by melancholy and
opium addiction, just as Keats's was shortened by tuberculosis. More
on the influence of longer poems below. For now, an aside:
Possessed of
training in other areas, I couldn't help noticing that of the top
nine poets by page count, five had serious mood disorders. Blake and
Coleridge were likely manic-depressive, Keats possibly, while Eliot
and Tennyson were "merely" depressive, though Tennyson remains suspect
for manic-depression because of his personal eccentricities and strong
family heritage (the infamous Lord, "Mad Jack," was his direct ancestor).
In any event, all the best recent research points to the same gene
as a locus for both illnesses, with differing levels of expression
in those affected.
**************
When making
anthologies the measure of greatness, the most obvious fallacy is:
"The longer you're dead, the better your chances" -- probably the
reason Marvell has one more page than Whitman and two more pages than
several younger writers bunched tightly at position twelve. And one
must also really discard the last fifty years, where one could plausibly
name fifty near equal contenders for future anthology inclusions,
although Heaney's Nobel must make him an odds-on favorite to reach
double digits in pages a century from now, as Eliot and Yeats, the
only Moderns to win the prize, have over twenty pages each.
But to the matter
at hand: Have I named my top ten? Of course not, that properly comes
at the end of the essay. What good is literary strip-tease if I take
my panties off first?
As it is, excepting
Shakespeare's short shrift by impediment of genre, it's not such a
bad list. I mean, Marvell by a nose over Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy,
Pope, Milton, Frost and Shelley for tenth place? Them's good hosses,
though I think it likely Frost will inch past his elders as the centuries
plod on. Of his contemporaries, only Eliot and Yeats have risen higher.
(As an aside, I can't tell you how many otherwise well-informed readers
outside the U.S. have written me in astonishment after reading Frost
for the first time: "Oh, I thought he was associated with children's
grammar school poetry and the like, so I never bothered" -- but his
art, once encountered, generally makes such readers deplore their
former ignorance.)
So, after the
advantages of time spent dead, and allowing for our inability to value
the poetry of the last fifty years, a third confounding factor in
assembling a list based on page count of an anthology of anthologies
is what I call "The Coleridge Anomaly," alluded to above. If one's
best poems are long, they yield a decided advantage in page counts.
Conversely, by counting pages rather than poems, we do a disservice
to poets who prefer small canvases, like Emily Dickinson, while expanding
the rankings of those who prefer large ones, like Coleridge, Eliot,
Wordsworth and Keats. As for Keats's high total, second only to Coleridge,
once you decide to include "The Eve of St. Agnes" (Keats's longest
fully realized poem), the young man starts with as many pages as Emily's
total, fourteen. But notice: Emily Dickinson is also the only woman
ranked in the top twenty, no small feat for someone who published
but a few poems in her lifetime.
If we recognize
the advantages this anthology confers upon the dead and the long-winded,
what other virtues should we consider in re-evaluating the raw list?
In The Western Canon and elsewhere, the irrepressible Harold
Bloom consistently asserts that literary greatness, or genius, must
both subsume the past and depart from it. Bloom calls this latter
virtue a difference not only in degree but in kind.
I concur with his principle in the main, but have argued in an earlier
essay [link]: [http://www.melicreview.com/cgibin/ess_archive.cgi?iss07.cechaffin.01]
that genius should also include universality of appeal, as I think
Bloom honors too many authors who, though admittedly original, are
out of reach of the "common reader" he posits; that his insistence
on "departure" results in a special admiration for the grotesque if
not counterbalanced by the test of universality. All of these virtues
assume, of course, that the poet has a substantial body of good work.
Let's look at
the list again:
1) Coleridge
(36)
2) Keats (32)
3) Donne (31)
4) Shakespeare (29)
5) Wordsworth (28)
6) Eliot (27)
7) Yeats (25)
8) Blake (24)
Tennyson (24)
10) Marvell (17)
11) Whitman (16)
12) Dickinson (15)
Frost (15)
Hardy (15)
Pope (15)
Milton (15)
Shelley (15)
I don't think
I'll get much argument in putting Shakespeare first, but who should
come second? Who is an innovator with a consistent body of excellent
work? Donne qualifies, having raised metaphor to such perfect pitch
in poems like "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning." He may be attacked
on the basis of lack of universal appeal, but I think anyone who likes
to read poetry will find his poems worth the work. His conceits are
more elegant than Shakespeare's, if his music not always as good.
Coleridge and
Blake were innovators, but both lack a body of consistently excellent
work, Coleridge more than Blake. Eliot and Wordsworth were innovators
who do have a body of consistently excellent work. Yeats and Keats
were not innovators, and Keats, like Coleridge, has a limited body
of good work, but what is good is so very good that he easily lands
in the top nine by page count. Keats extended the ode in English and
likely perfected it better than any before or since, but this is less
a major innovation than an advance in craft, much like Yeats, who
raised the Victorian lyric to a modern sensibility in his late poems.
Likewise, Tennyson did little different from his forbears, though
he did raise the lyric to new heights of euphony, and perhaps defined
the nature of melancholy, especially in his In Memoriam A.H.H.,
which according to legend, Queen Victoria kept on her bedstead with
her bible.
For the sake
of the English Renaissance and the Elizabethan mindset that produced
it, as well as perfection of craft with innovation, I'll take Donne
at second not only to give the Bard some Elizabethan company, but
also because I don't think any poet in English has matched Donne's
intellectual rigor in substance and form: he appropriates both sides
of his brain brilliantly, and he also covers all the major themes
of English poetry well -- Love, Death, God, and Nature (which includes
the always popular Spring: "When that April, with his showers soote
/ April is the cruelest month / When I behold the daffodils!")
Now who should
come third? Blake, Wordsworth and Eliot are all innovators, but only
Wordsworth and Eliot really subsumed the tradition and departed from
it: Blake, like Whitman and Dickinson, appears almost out of a vacuum.
Wordsworth has the most universal appeal, perhaps, although Blake's
"The Tiger" is the most anthologized poem in the language, but to
really understand Blake you must get into Immanuel Swedenborg and
Blake's personal mythology: the anthologized poems make it look as
if he were only the author of simple lyrics, not the organizing mind
behind a spiritual revolution as he saw it. Eliot's appeal is not
so universal as Wordsworth's or Blake's; like Donne, he can be difficult.
Yet next to Wordsworth, who spawned the Romantic movement in English,
Eliot (with Pound) was the most revolutionary and influential of those
on our list.
I don't like
Wordsworth, except for a few great poems; I jokingly refer to his
poetic grail, The Prelude, as "The Quaalude." He does have
a body of consistently excellent work, but it was composed before
the age of forty, and almost everything he wrote after that is eminently
forgettable.
Yet despite
my personal dislike of his verse, I cannot argue with those who crown
him the most influential poet of the 19th Century; and as the Romantic
Movement preceded the Moderns, I suppose he deserves third place.
Also, I don't want to go too far afield from the initial page counts
in re-arranging this list, and he has more pages than Eliot by one
and than Blake by four. Notice, please, that I do not say Wordsworth
is thereby a better poet than Eliot or Blake, only that literary history,
as I understand it, must accord him a higher place.
So:
1) Shakespeare
2) Donne
3) Wordsworth
The reader can
perhaps anticipate my next move: though less universal in appeal than
Wordsworth, Eliot deserves fourth place for his far-reaching effect
on poetry. There's been really nothing new since "The Waste Land,"
a poem which incorporates current culture, street talk, jazz rhythms,
symbolism, superstition, psychoanalysis and near anything else one
could throw into a modern or post-modern poem. Like the others above
him, he subsumed the tradition and departed from it. He can rightly
be criticized for being obscure, but he felt his poems could be understood
without knowing all the allusions, and I agree. Learning the allusions
in his poems may add to the pleasure but does not materially change
the substance of his poetry, which operates out of time by paradox,
almost as if he subsumed the new tradition of relativity in physics
as well.
Now to number
five: shall I go with a major innovator (Coleridge, Blake) or a great
craftsman (Keats, Yeats, Tennyson)? I love Coleridge, but even Keats
has a body of work more consistent in quality, despite his young death.
And though Coleridge was an innovator, Wordsworth gets most of the
credit for the Romantic revolution: he opened the floodgates of fresh
expression about feelings, consciousness, and man's personal connection
to the world of nature. Blake, like Coleridge, suffers from inconsistency
in the body of his work, as most of his anthologized poems, for instance,
come from Songs of Innocence and Experience.
Aye, there's
the rub: When does sustained craft trump innovation? If only craft
were next, it would surely be Yeats vs. Keats, followed by Tennyson.
If only innovation were next, it would be Blake then Coleridge. But
one must come to some sort of agreement in one's mind among the various
operative factors, so I choose the visionary Blake next, then Yeats,
then Keats, then Coleridge, then Tennyson. And for number ten, as
I have already alluded to, I would choose Frost, because not only
did he attain an unimpeachable level of craft, he changed formal verse
forever by incorporating normal syntax, ridding his verse of all unnatural
inversions and antiquisms before Yeats thought to do it. Thus he set
the standard for formal verse ever more: any mangling of syntax or
use of poeticisms can no longer be tolerated since his example.
Let's look at
my list now:
1) Shakespeare
(29)
2) Donne (31)
3) Wordsworth (28)
4) Eliot (27)
5) Blake (24)
6) Yeats (25)
7) Keats (32)
8) Coleridge (36)
9) Tennyson (24)
10) Frost (15)
Why I eschewed
Dickinson and Whitman can be explained by the fact that they did not
adequately subsume the tradition, but virtually wrote apart from it.
I won't deny their genius, but neither will I endorse a higher position
for two whose lives were somewhat insular to the literary world at
large, especially in the case of Dickinson. As for Milton, don't ask:
I think he wrote in EngLatin, not English, for the most part,
with his circuitous blank verse periods. He might be better consigned
to Chaucer's circle outside the circle. Hardy is good, but his craft
is not as good as Frost's; Pope was not different in kind, only degree,
from Dryden; Marvell's been dead a long time, which gives him an unfair
advantage, and Shelley, well, do I have to talk about Shelley? His
verse is rich in thought and music, but he lacks an internal editor
to tell him when to quit. In reading him I am struck, as in Hart Crane's
work, by a poet too much in love with the sound of his own voice to
stop and question it.
After Shakespeare
I realize my ranking is open to assault from all sides: I was somewhat
arbitrary in balancing craft and innovation. Yeats' craft is so good
it made me raise him above Coleridge, an innovator; Blake is not the
master of language that Yeats is, but his impact over time has been
at least as great, due to his intensity and accessibility. And except
for Shakespeare, Keats and Coleridge, my analysis allows for the general
order of page counts to prevail, although Yeats is ranked below Blake
despite having one more page.
I don't believe
that Blake is a better poet than Yeats; it's hard to find a better
poet than Yeats in terms of craft. Again, the innovation factor made
me favor Blake over him. And in my defense, remember I ranked Wordsworth
third, which caused me to swallow hard. These rankings are about overall
impact, greatness, genius -- not individual skill.
Whatever you
think of this list, remember, in my schema, the top nine could not
be dislodged, only re-arranged. I suppose if I wrote another essay
the order might change a little -- I might rank Yeats above Blake,
for instance -- but I am fairly confident I would end up with the
same first four.
Now raise your
glasses and let the arguments begin!
