The Anthology Age
Poems of Sleep. Chosen by Carol Stewart. (Muller. 10s. 6d.) An Anthology of the Home Counties. By John D. Mortimer, with and Spottiswoode. 16s.) To read anthologies—especially the anthologies that have been flooding out since the war—must be about the easiest way of reading poetry. The pieces are short. You have the pleasure of lighting on familiar passages ; and beween them the unfamiliar things slip in easily. And today there are artful divisions and headings and even illustrations. There can be few people who do not enjoy anthologies at some time ; and it is one of the more agreeable trifles about 1947 that so many have been published. They are still appearing—no doubt in preparation for the Christmas market.
In this anthology age the themes can be almost anything—from cats to mysticism. Of these five books one has the theme of a physiological state (sleep), one of occasion, two of geography and one of a single poet. Poems of Sleep and Dream (of the New Excursions into English Poetry series) is the least adorned of the five, with only a short introduction and then, except for lithographs by Robert Colquhoun, extracts without comment. It does not claim to be a complete anthology of the subject, and most readers will miss favourites. Where are Arnold's Come to Me in My Dreams, Shelley's Night, Alice Meynell's I Must Not Think of Thee ? But there is no point in continuing. The book contains one charming poem after another and represents at least eighty writers ; and if one or two of the extracts have only a remote connection with the theme—Ezekiel's vision of the bones, for example—the theme is not important. What is important is that there should be another collection of good poetry to be read.
And So to Bed had its origins in broadcasting ; the passages were chosen for a before-midnight programme to "compose the mind" in 1942 and 1943. Mr. Sackville-West explains that he has omitted the more familiar material broadcast and also excerpts that had direct reference to the war. He scatters conversational comments here and there (though not the comments used in the broadcasts), and to make the book more readable has divided it into seasons. He ranges fairly widely over the centuries and includes some translations from French, German and Latin, a good deal of modern verse, and many prose and poetry extracts that the ordinary anthology reader will not know. De la Mare, for example, an obvious choice, is represented by three little-known poems—two of them at least uncharacteristic.
The Home Counties in Mr. Mortimer's anthology stretch far—as far as Oxford and Cambridge and Cowper's Olney. Oddly, this is a country collection ; London hardly exists in it. This is because it is a collection from the past. John Betjeman in his introduction calls it "a memorial volume" awakening "a sense of how beautiful England once was." A scattered few modern writers—one passage from Sassoon one from Binyon, a few from Belloc—are much out- weighed by ihe Evelyns, Defoe.s, Cobbetts and Dickenses. The interest is therefore topographical as well as literary. You can see how familiar places have changed. Uxbridge, for example, to Defoe, is "a pleasant large market town, famous in particular for having abundance of noble seats of gentlemen." The book is divided into short sections including scenery, customs, ballads and epitaphs, and there are some pleasant photographs, also mainly rural.
Very beautiful photography is used to decorate the Switzerland anthology. This is a curiously unsatisfactory book, changing its tone half way through. It begins with eminent travellers such as Evelyn, Addison, Gibbon, of course, and the Wordsworths, and there are several pages on Shelley, though Mr. Lunn believes that he "was not wholly sane." Then come Byron and the Arnolds, Ruskin, Stevenson—all people one reads for the pleasure of their writing. And then the book suddenly becomes a close little preserve for Alpinists who do not much care how they write. Huw many people
admirable Gamesmanship. Mr. Potter, in this extremely witty book, is the first person to have raised physical games of skill to the level of complicated intellectual battles. After reading it (and I am sure that many will agree with me) I feel I would prefer to watch two expert gamesmen, but indifferent athletes, in action, rather than a contest between orthodox world champions who only know how to
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