The Oxford Companion to Poetry in English

This new book is a massive biographical dictionary with a few additional entries on “topics, movements, magazines, and genres” (v). The 1500 poets included make a suitably diverse group with substantial representation from Australia (120 poets), Canada (110), Africa (60), Asia (40), New Zealand (35), and the Caribbean (30), in addition to English and American delegations of about 550 each. Thus the volume makes good on its claim to represent twentieth-century poetry in English and not just twentieth-century English poetry, and this is an important distinction. Beyond this tally of names and nationalities, however, the Companion is a good deal less open and diverse. The number of “topics” included is not very great, and the treatment of “movements” and “genres” seems to show a definite bias. How companionable one finds this volume, then, is likely to depend a great deal on the extent to which one shares its taste in twentieth-century poetry.

With 1500 individuals represented, it might seem that no one significant can have been left out, and this is very nearly the case. David Antin, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Robert Service are all missing, and yet the very diversity of this short list suggests that sheer accident is the only explanation for their omission. On the other hand, ignorance of Dunbar does allow Lewis Turco to say quite inaccurately of Langston Hughes that he was “the first American black to make a living as a writer” (240). And the fact that there are other possible candidates as well, including William Stanley Brathwaite and Fenton Johnson, who are also omitted from the Companion, shows how thinly it has penetrated into African American poetry. Of the women poets of the Harlem Renaissance such as Georgia Douglas Johnson, Anne Spencer, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Angelina Grimke, none are included.

Even the Harlem Renaissance writers who are covered are often described in terms so cursory as to be inaccurate. For example, Turco also claims that Hughes was the “first black American to write civil rights protest poetry that was identifiable as such” (241), a mistake that might have been avoided by timely reference to the entry in this volume on Claude McKay, whose fierce beadle of self defense, “If We Must Die,” was nationally known when Hughes was still in high school. In another curious entry, Turco says flatly of Jean Toomer that he “was not part of the Harlem Renaissance” (546), which oversimplifies, at the very least, the role of a poet who is listed as one of the “major figures” of the Harlem Renaissance elsewhere in this very volume (213).

So little inspired is Turco by Toomer’s work itself that not one word of description or analysis is expended on it, merely an extreme case of the general practice in these entries, which are long on the life and short on the art. This may be just as well, since the critical terminology brought to bear on the African American poets is both peculiar and inconsistent. Robert Hayden, for example, is included along with Gwendolyn Brooks in a bizarre list of “postmodernist blacks,” though his own entry points out that he was “always a formal poet” (221). There is little in the entry on Brooks to suggest how she may have come to be classed as a postmodernist, especially since that entry focuses so heavily on subject matter as to miss her significant shift from received to experimental forms.

This last omission, however, is merely one instance of a lack of interest in formal innovation widespread in the pages of the Companion. One of the few truly dismissive entries, beside that visited on the unfortunate Alfred Austin, is the one on Allen Ginsberg. “The recent surge of interest in formal verse,” we are told, has restricted Ginsberg’s influence to “ageing members of the New York School and San Francisco’s college radicals” (188). Even readers outside these two notorious intellectual fleshpots may have missed this “recent surge of interest in formal...