Dear Eva
Thanks for your further comment about the publication dates of anthologies.
Various arguments could be drawn from publication data. For instance, once might look at the dates of birth of these five editors – Allott born 1912, Enright born 1920, Alvarez born 1929, Macbeth born 1932, Lucie-Smith born 1933 – and attempt to draw conclusions about their “social formation” and its possible bearing on their literary experience and preferences. I think such arguments should be treated with care, however: surely none of us is, in any simple sense, the product of our age. Or one might attempt to detect whether over time there had been any interesting shifts in the distribution of male and female poets appearing in such anthologies. This, too, would need to be treated with caution: apparently similar effects may have disparate causes.
You write of editors “operating on received ideas: a self-perpetuating closed club” – and no doubt you are right, though my own experience – and not just of editors – is that received ideas are as various as those who hold them. Indeed, I guess that the intellectual equipment of most of us (in this I include myself) is built up at least in part of ideas we have received from elsewhere without subjecting them to the scrutiny they demand. Alas...
I always regard the editors of anthologies as having an agenda beyond the perhaps superficially innocent one of documentation, and so I read them sceptically and make such use of them in my own wider thinking as I find helpful. I certainly do not regard them as establishing any kind of canon – though they may represent someone else’s idea of a canon. Still, I imagine that being included in an anthology must give a great sense of fulfilment and recognition. (It’s never happened to me, nor – thank goodness! – is it ever likely to happen.)
I see no problem with discussing the merits of the work of any poet, of whichever sex and whether included or not included in any anthology. Surely such discussion lies close to the heart of a developed literary culture. But perhaps this topic is meat for a different thread.
By the way, and finally.... You refer, no doubt in a kind of shorthand, to the “post-enlightened 1960's”. This made me smile somewhat wryly. I was a young man in the 1960s: I was in the sixth-form in the early part of the decade and at university from 1963 to 1968. My wife’s experience closely parallels my own. Our sense of that period, in its social and cultural attitudes, was that it was far more like the 1950s than some commentators seem to believe these days. In our perception, the big changes occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. But that, too, is probably a topic for another thread.
And that’s enough from me on this interesting and important topic.
Regards
Clive
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