Frankfurters with "Open the Door, Richard"

First, a disclosure of interest: I contributed two articles to this encyclopedia. Second, an admission: I don't know enough to review this book. But neither does anyone else, so I'll just share some notes.

We have here the fourth in a succession that began with The Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics(Princeton) in 1965. It grew into The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics(enlarged edition) in 1974 and then The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poeticsin 1993. Along the way it spun off two subsets: The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms(1986), a third the size of the full encyclopedia, and The Princeton Handbook of Multicultural Poetries(1995). "Multicultural" in the title is merely an opportunistic exploitation of trends, since the entries just collect earlier material concerning national and regional poetries without specific attention to cultural interaction.

The chief authors of the earlier versions were Alex Preminger, Frank J. Warnke, O. B. Hardison, and T. V. F. Brogan. With the death of Brogan at age fifty-nine in 2010, all of the original encyclopedists were gone, although their presence continues to be felt in the fourth edition. That especially applies to Brogan, who had a hand (at times rather high) in scores of entries, especially those dealing with niceties of rhetoric, diction, and prosody. Advertisements for the earlier editions boasted that contributors included several celebrities, only a few of whom seem to have survived, at least as contributors, in the new edition; once showcased, a number of luminaries have faded: Northrop Frye, Philip Wheelwright, John Hollander, William Carlos Williams, Paul de Man, Camille Paglia. If the index is to be trusted, a few of those have now disappeared from the encyclopedia entirely.

The ideally qualified reviewer of this book would know hundreds of languages intimately, since poetry is profoundly specific to language. If you do not know a language well, with its historical layers, idioms, variations, dialects, sounds, and much else, you really cannot begin to appreciate its poetry. You may admire it from afar, but translations, even the finest, will not give you more than a hint, a taste, of what is there to be savored. Anybody who loves poetry has to feel the pathos in the situation of an ardent reader who can never really read more than a fraction of a fraction of 1 percent of the wonderful poems that must be out there. It's humbling.

We deal with our humiliation in two antithetical ways: by lumping poetry with the most general concepts, such as Spiritual Life in the Universe, about which we can never be precise or clear; and by splitting poetry into infinitesimal subdivisions governed by a manic urge to name, define, and manage every little thing. The former impulse leads to such erethistic windbaggery as "Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present"; the latter impulse, no less ridiculous, leads to the farce of Die Meistersinger, with their Tabulaturof petty rules demanding all sorts of outlandish practices in music and poetry. At the end of that avenue lie such goofy categories as "the melody of the little striped saffron flower" ( Gestreiftsafranblumleinweis). One can choose to be entertained by Percy Bysshe Shelley on the one hand or by Sixtus Beckmesser on the other.

The new edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poeticsprovides material at both extremes—the Shelleyan and the Beckmesserist— but all of the material is unavoidably inconsistent. On the one hand I cannot imagine that many would go to such a volume for articles on the big deals ( Absorption, Appreciation, Attention, Closure, Concision, Constraint, Emotion, Evaluation, Genius, Hermeticism, Imagination, Influence, Inspiration, Intuition, Invention, Je ne sais quoi, Naturalism, Nature, Originality, Presence, Reader, Representation, Sensibility, Wit, Work). Admittedly those matters can be interesting and amusing, but all, broader in their scope than poetry itself, are adequately covered...