ABSTRACT
‘HE may at least be sure of a place in the anthologies of the future’ is a reviewer’s phrase that has brought comfort, I suppose, to a good many poets who have not hoped for the larger things of fame. And yet it is strange, for all the diligence of the compilers, to find how many good poets pass with their death into what it would seem may be, but for some lucky accident, permanent oblivion. Herrick publishes his Hesperides in 1648, and no further edition of what is probably the greatest single volume of lyrics in the language is called for until 1810, when John Nott of Bristol, M.D., comes forward with Select Poems embellished with Occasional Remarks. Andrew Marvell dies unpublished, but, a little more fortunate in his posthumous fame, appears in a handsome little folio in 1681, which is followed by a new edition forty-five years later, by another fifty years later still, and then he waits nearly another hundred years for the almost 192universal industry of Dr. Grosart. So good a poet as Richard Corbet, with his Farewell Reusards and Fairies, appears first in 1647, then again in a surreptitious edition in 1648, and then for a third time in 1672. In 1807 he is rediscovered by Octavius Gilchrist, and after that he remains unedited until our own time; while a poet such as Rochester, at his best a lyrist that none of them can surpass, has never from the beginning had his text or his canon rescued from confusion. 1 These poets are among those who, even in long periods of public neglect, have never wholly escaped the attention of scholars or occasional inclusion in the miscellanies, but the absence of any readily accessible editions of their works has meant that over and over again one student or compiler has merely relied for his knowledge or selection upon one or two poems singled out by his predecessors, and this even when the work in hand has been a serious study and not merely a piece of easy book-compiling. The ordinary hack anthologist need not be considered. In nearly every case he simply steals, more or less at haphazard, from the patient labours of honester men than himself. But it is remarkable how, if we take our view of a poet from, say, ten standard English anthologies, we may easily get a hopelessly inadequate view of his work. To take two examples. Richard Barnefield is a name at least known to every reader who is familiar at all with English poetry. His original editions are practically unprocurable, there being in each case perhaps but three or four known copies, while the Roxborough reprint is by no means common, and otherwise the ordinary reader is cut off from access to the full texts. Looking at these ten anthologies, The 193 Golden Treasury, The Oxford Book of English Verse, Ward’s English Poets, Beeching’s Paradise of English Poetry, Mrs. Meynell’s Flower of the Mind, Sir Arthur Quiller Couch’s Golden Pomp, Henley’s English Lyrics, Mr. Massingham’s Seventeenth Century English Verse, Mr. Braithwaite’s Elizabethan Verse, and, last, the frankly popular but very comprehensive Book of English Poetry published by Messrs. Jack, we get this result. Mr. Massingham omits Barnefield altogether, as he does not come within his period; of the other nine, seven give The Nightingale alone, while the other two give The Nightingale and If Music and Sweet Poetry Agree, and Ward adds one other sonnet. This means that to all intents and purposes Barnefield is known to nearly the whole English poetry reading public by one poem, and that, charming as it is, not in my opinion his best. As an example of the quality which is entirely unknown to the general reader, and almost so to the scholar, let me quote two of Barnefield’s pieces from Poems in Divers Humors published by John Jaggard in 1598: An Epitaph Upon the Death of his Aunt, Mistresse Elizabeth Skrymsher
Loc here beholde the certaine Ende, of euery liuing wight: No Creature is secure from Death, for Death will haue his Right.
He spareth none: both rich and poore, both young and olde must die;
So fraile is flesh, so short is Life, so sure Mortalitie.
When first the Bodye liues to Life, the soule first dies to sinne:
And they that loose this earthly Life, a heavenly Life shall winne,
If they Hue well: as well she liv’d, that lyeth Vnder heere;
