A New Anthology

30:3, Reviews A NEW ANTHOLOGY Ian Fletcher, ed. British Poetry and Prose 1870-1905. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Cloth $34.00 Paper $14.95 Like those famous women speaking of Michelangelo, anthologies of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century British literature come and go. For the most part, anthologies have limited themselves to poetry or prose or to Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s. But an anthology including the poetry and prose of a wide spectrum of writers during the transitional period has been rare. For that reason Ian Fletcher's is of particular interest. In his lengthy introduction, Fletcher defends the chronological limitations of his anthlology. His inaugural date of 1870 offers no strenuous objection, for many literary historians, like Fletcher, see "proto-modernism" in the 1870s in various reactions against many of the cultural values associated with High Victorianism, such as increasing gloom from the mid-century crisis in faith, a resistance to imperialistic optimism and affluence, and intimations of new literary expression. But why 1905 as a terminal date for the anthology (as Fletcher says, a seemingly "queer date with which to conclude")? The volume expires just as Modernism begins to take significant shape— specifically, with the "forgotten school of pre-Imagists." For Fletcher, political events, such as the years when Conservative rule ended for a decade, seem to dictate literary anthologizing. Fletcher's introduction, revealing a wish to sum up the late Victorian age, is breathless in its sweep of cultural, political, and artistic developments: allusions are sometimes elliptical; complex opinions startle in one-liners. Among the latter: "If we except Hardy, Swinburne remains the major poet of this period. This may slant eyebrows on the cisatlantic side." (Since the book has been published simultaneously in Oxford and New York, which side of the Atlantic is he referring to?) Fletcher's remark apparently refers to the pre-1870 period—that is, prior to the inaugural date of his anthology. At any rate, chronology wobbles, for following his discussion of the limitations and strengths of Swinburne, a brief paragraph on the Decadent poets— Lionel Johnson , Dowson, and Gray—is followed by a new section with the statement: "Hopkins has now [?] displaced Swinburne as the major poet of the later nineteenth century." But later, following a brief analysis, Fletcher decides that Hopkins is a "fine poet of the second class" who wrote only one major poem, "The Wreck of the Deutschland"—"a triumph he was never able to repeat." Fletcher regards Hopkins's "affinities" with Modernism as "largely superficial," for his "clotted diction recalls the stuffy interiors of Victorian middle-class houses"—that is, "reminiscent of the mid-century's weighting of surface at the expense of structure." But Hopkins's "clotted diction" is nowhere analogous to the decorative objects of the Victorian middle-class home, designed to reveal affluence and respectability. The darling of Modemist critics, Hopkins still maintains 341 30:3, Reviews his commanding lead, though, of late, attention has been flagging, and Swinburne has slowly emerged as an important critic whose poetry is more honored in the breeches. Clearly, Fletcher's anthology (for more reasons than the introduction, which requires the sophistication of a knowledgeable reader) does not have the undergraduate or that mythical beast "the general reader" in mind as its intended audience. The more sophisticated reader is therefore likely to judge the inclusions (and exclusions) by criteria other than "representative" selections expected in the undergraduate anthology. For the most part, the old familiar names are here, though one may quarrel with editorial decisions: for example, Wilde—for some mysterious reason—is represented by only two selections: the brief preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray and "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"—a seemingly meager showing for one whom Fletcher has elsewhere called a "major" writer. And why is Beardsley's erotically Decadent Venus and Tannhäuser, one of the unique products of the 1890s, omitted? Moreover, some major figures are strenuously resisted entirely: for example, Hardy, Morris, and Conrad (in the introduction, Fletcher states enigmatically, while expounding on the "mythicizing " power of short stories by Wells and Kipling: "Conrad's stories of the 1890s are beyond the scope...