THE OXFORD BOOK OF AMERICAN POETRY
edited by David Lehman
Oxford University Press ₤25, 864 pages

“I am large, I contain multitudes,” Walt Whitman declared in 1855 in “Song of Myself”, American poetry’s most audacious, original and dazzling declaration of independence from British conventions of poetry... Some seven years later the reclusive daughter of an Amherst lawyer included in one of her cleverly stitched little homemade booklets, a poem - itself stitched together with dashes - that began: “The Soul selects her own Society - / Then - shuts the Door - “

American poets tend not to do things by halves. If Whitman is the most relentlessly public poet the world has ever produced, then Emily Dickinson is the most cryptically private. What they shared was the need to create wholly new poetic idioms that would be commensurate with the idea of America and the experience of being American, but which struck many of their first readers as outrageous, incomprehensible, or simply not poetry.

The only positive responses Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass received - aside from an admiring letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson - were the reviews he wrote himself and published anonymously, while the handful of Dickinson poems that appeared in magazines in her lifetime were shorn of dashes, re-punctuated and generally made to conform with notions of poetic respectability.

Whitman and Dickinson are, inevitably, the central poets in The Oxford Book of American Poetry anthology, which is considerably more multitudinous than its 1976 predecessor, edited by Richard Ellmann. Ellmann included 78 poets. David Lehman’s volume has room for 210. Neither anthology, aside from the mavericks Whitman and Dickinson, is a particularly rewarding read until we hit the 20th century. And then suddenly American poetry as a whole finds its voice - with Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot (claimed here for America, despite his becoming a British citizen in 1927) and Hart Crane.

Oddly, it was at exactly this point that American poetry lost much of its audience. Poets of the 19th century, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier, sold in truckloads and enjoyed comfortable incomes from their literary careers. Most of the Modernists, on the other hand, published in little magazines and in small print-runs.

Williams worked all his life as a doctor and Stevens as an insurance lawyer. Eliot took a job in a bank, while Pound lived off rich patrons and literary hackwork. Only Frost managed to develop a large popular following - although in fact the more one probes seemingly comforting poems such as “The Road Not Taken” or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, the less reassuring they become.

This book is most valuable as a guide to postwar American poetry, however, and is particularly to be commended for the way it presents the achievement of poets who began writing in the 1940s and 1950s as in no way overshadowed by their Modernist forebears. It seems likely that literary historians of the future will identify the period between, say, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” of 1955 and John Ashbery’s long poem of 1975, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (included in its entirety in this anthology), as a golden age of American poetry.

In these decades appeared the best work of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Frank O’Hara, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, A.R. Ammons, and Ginsberg and Ashbery - to name only my top 10 of this generation.

Lehman’s taste is catholic and astute, and less highbrow than Ellmann’s. Here one gets the terse wit of Dorothy Parker, the language games of Gertrude Stein, the blues-inspired songs of Langston Hughes, the light verse of Ogden Nash and Bob Dylan’s great counter-culture carnival, “Desolation Row”.

Browsing through it, time and again I was put in mind of an Emily Dickinson letter in which she tried to define a true poem. “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. Is there any other way?”

Mark Ford is a professor of English at University College London.