The Columbia History of British Poetry (32 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 131
last time is bright light made." Unlike his obvious models in verse, from Praed to Belloc, from Charles Dibdin to George Grossmith, Betjeman must be read attentively; he crossed and recrossed continuously the border between verse and poetry. He took no step into modernism.
Betjeman's atavistic employment of the stanzaic patterns familiar from popular comic verse goes far to explain why John Murray could sell more than one hundred thousand copies of the
Collected Poems
of 1958. In "Preface to
High and Low
" (1966) Betjeman praised the English language for "such range, / Such rhymes and half-rhymes, rhythms strange, / And such variety of tone, / It is a music of its own." He offers in evidence Milton, Cowper, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dowson, but his practice caps, for now, the tradition of popular English balladry.
Further Reading
Friedman, Albert B.
The Ballad Revival: Studies the Influence of Popular on Sophisticated Poetry
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
Gerould, Gordon Hall.
The Ballad of Tradition
. Oxford: Clarendon, 1932.
Noakes, Vivien.
Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer
. London: Collins, 1968.
Pinto, Vivian de Sola, and A. E. Rodway, eds.
The Common Muse: An Anthology of Popular British Ballad Poetry
. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.
Sargent, Helen Child, and George Lyman Kittredge, eds.
English and Scottish Popular Ballads
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904.
Sewell, Elizabeth.
The Field of Nonsense
. London: Chatto & Windus, 1952.
Shepard, Leslie.
The Broadside Ballad: A Study in Origins and Meaning
. London: Jenkins, 1962.
Shepard, Leslie.
The History of Street Literature
. Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1973.
Vicinus, Martha.
The Industrial Muse
. London: Croom Helm; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974.
 
Page 132
Printing and Distribution of Poetry
David McKitterick
To an extent shared by few other kinds of literature, factual or imaginative, poetry is shaped both in its initial conception and in printing within the material form of a book. As, line by line, stanza by stanza, a poem is gradually formed into an ordered sequence, so the gathering of poems into a volume also demands choices of order and hierarchy, a sequence that by its various groupings will require balancing acts of compromise and tension among its various groupings. A volume of poems implies, and indeed presents in a formal physical shape to its readers, a series of works whose textual existence and nature is created anew by their placing and physical associations, page by page through a volume.
It will be obvious that this conjunction of literary inspiration and response to the means of publication is inescapable in collections of shorter poemspoems usually written over several years and often in different forms. Long poems such as
Paradise Lost
, Pope's
Dunciad
, and Byron's
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
each filling one or more volumes, with their own narrative or other structuresdemand no decisions in their published sequence other than those developed by the pen on the paper in the process of composition. Similarly, sequences such as Shakespeare's sonnets or Tennyson's
In Memoriam
introduce their own order quite independently. But for all, whether poem or collection of poems, the conventions of the physical book and of book design dictate the essentials of the containing vessel.
From title page to final colophon the book is at once a constraint and a form to be exploited. Dedication, preface, and table of contents offer
 
Page 133
an introduction that can be balanced in the final pages by notes, indexes of titles and first lines, and, if appropriate, statement of limitation of the number of copies printed. In the eighteenth century, and less frequently in the nineteenth, lists of subscribers helped further to place both book and author in their social position among their readers.
Whether grouped by subject or by form, in chronological order of composition or (in the case of retrospective collections) of previous publication, each ordering was a result of the decision to assemble poems and their associated textual equipage in the fixed sequence of a book. In the last years of his life Tennyson insisted that his collected poems should always end with
Crossing the Bar
, written in 1889. And in 1851the year he became poet laureatehe dedicated his poems with one addressed to Queen Victoria; this dedicatory poem stood at the beginning of subsequent collections. But while beginnings and ends could be thus established, the course between could be far from plain.
In 1796 Coleridge wrote of "poems on various subjects written at different times and prompted by very different feelings; but which will be read at one time and under the influence of one set of feelingsthis is an heavy disadvantage. . . ." In believing that the poems would be read at a sitting, or at worst over quite a short space of time, Coleridge certainly assumed too much; the linear organization imposed by the codex form of a bookof sheets printed, folded, and bound in a particular and final orderneed not affect the manner, extent, or order of reading if the reader does not wish it. It will usually, however, affect the author's expectation of his
understanders
, to borrow a seventeenth-century term that was sometimes used synonymously with readers.
The inescapable editorial framing of what are rather loosely and (by convention) generally thought of as the contents of a bookthose pages containing the words of the author named on the title page, rather than the pages that introduce and conclude themprovides the route toward reading. For although (since a book may be easily opened at any point) they may be readily avoided, they are by their nature both the proffered and the expected route toward understanding.
By way of reminder that these involved no idle decisions, the publisher's address to the "understanders" of the first (posthumous) collection of Donne's
Poems
(1633) was particular. It drew attention specifically to the placing of the accompanying tributes, by Henry King and others, written shortly after Donne's death. And it explained that while

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