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English Verse Satire. An unsigned review of A Book of English Verse Satire, ed. A. G. Barnes
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- document
- Additional Information
London: Methuen, 1926. Pp. xix + 172.
To make a good anthology it is not enough to select good poems. It is necessary to have a plan, and a plan justified of literary criticism; and it is necessary to have a sense of proportion and order beyond one’s personal enthusiasms. A good anthology, of the special type, is proved by three results – it renews our acquaintance with verse which we have neglected, it reveals to us verse of which we were ignorant, and it exposes relationships where we did not suppose them to exist. A good anthology is a work of literary criticism in itself.
Mr. Barnes’s anthology is fully justified. It is small – the text covers only 147 pages. The temptation to include specimens of every poet who has ever written satirical lines is one which Mr. Barnes has avoided; every one of the poets included may be said to have paid some attention to satire as a literary form. The book is arranged in chronological order, and begins with Donne and Hall. Though we think that a specimen of Marston might have been added, if only to show the superiority of both Donne and Hall, the principle is right: to date satire only from the period when English poets began consciously to emulate Persius and Juvenal.
Mr. Barnes has so clearly recognized and faithfully obeyed the limitations that it is surprising to find how much good satire, in the strict sense, there is in English verse, and how much that is little known. The greatest satirists are included and represented by their best-known pieces – Dryden by Og and Doeg and MacFlecknoe, Pope by Atticus and the other most familiar selections – and these inclusions are of great value in helping us to estimate the unknown and unjudged by the known and undisputed.
Such an anthology is itself a better definition of English satire than any that can be formulated. For instance, when we read a part of