The Columbia History of British Poetry (34 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 140
stimulus and their own distinctive voice to the publication of poetry, at the same time as edition sizes for books other than those by the most established authors have slipped further in relation to the size of the adult literate population.
For as long as the printing and publishing trades were undercapital-ized and equipment barely adequate, errata were inevitable. They were the result of both poor management and obscure copy (poor handwriting and lax punctuation were constant complaints of printers), while the practice of correcting the forme, of type even in the midst of printing a run of copies meant that variant copies were the norm. Texts had a consequent fluidity about them that gainsays too extreme claims for the ability of printing to fix a text and provide a completely shared frame of reference.
Increasing investment in printing and publishing allowed more time in the schedule of production, and made it easier in the nineteenth century for authors to give more detailed consideration to their proofs. Tennyson was liable to rewrite heavily as well as to revise his texts from edition to edition. More recently, Sylvia Plath has recorded how Ted Hughes would, if allowed, rewrite a poem in print to the point where only another's intervention could halt the process. Such a procedure has found ample parallels among other authorsin prose as well as in poetry. To see a work in manuscript, in typescript, and then in print is, in effect, to see three different works, each prompting further revision, though the cost of alteration by typesetters has, especially since World War II, tended to discourage changes in proof on the scale once acceptable.
An author's manuscript, drafted and redrafted and copied out finally for the press, has several further stages through which it must pass before publication. Typography itself is an interpretationthe margins and the spaces between words, lines, stanzas, and separate poems each adding their own contributions to the way in which a poem and a volume will be viewed and read. The choice of typefaces will always be restricted, governed perhaps by publisher (perhaps also in consultation with the author), but subject always to the equipment available to the printer. Indeed, the poem itself to a great extent can determine the appropriate typographical form. Oliver Simon, a practicing printer at one of the most important presses in London, the Curwen Press, took a sane and straightforward view of this surprisingly neglected aspect of printingin his
Introduction to Typography
(1945):
 
Page 141
The choice of a good type face and its point size is governed by the importance of avoiding broken lines, therefore the types with a narrow set, and in relatively small sizes, are the most suitable, such as Bembo, Caslon, Ehrhardt, Fournier, Times and Walbaum. Type that is too large is a disadvantage because it means that the shape of the poem may be lost, and the shape of a poem is not only pleasing to the eye, but is a help to the mind in grasping the rhythmic character of the poem. This is important in much contemporary poetry when no traditional metrical scheme is followed.
Alertness to typographical formas vehicle of the verbal text and therefore as a means toward its identity and interpretationhas been perceived by some as an essential, by others as a necessary chore, and by yet others scarcely at all. Coleridge was specific in his instructions to his publisher Joseph Cottle, when considering with Wordsworth the form of
Lyrical Ballads
in 1798: "18 lines in a page, the lines closely printed, certainly
more closely
than those of the Joan [Southey's
Joan of Arc
, 1796]
equal ink, & Large margins
. That is
beauty
it may even under your immediate care mingle the sublime!" Only a few months before, he had been similarly instructing Cottle on the appearance of his
Poems
(1797), with calculations respecting lines to a page, and thus sheets to a volume, with details of the setting of titles and page numbers: he was as much concerned with the price (and edition size) of the volume as with its layout. About a hundred years later, and by this time dealing with a much larger printing house and with machine printing rather than a hand press, W. B. Yeats took an even keener interest in the design of his books than had Coleridge.
In negotiating with T. Fisher Unwin for the production of his
Poems
(1895), Yeats required that he should be able to specify the height and breadth of his volume; that he should be able to specify the paper on which it was printed; that it should be printed by either Clarke or Constable, two large printing firms both notable for the quality of their bookwork; and that he should be consulted in choosing an artist for the title-page decoration ("good 'decorative' men are fairly plentiful just now & fairly cheap"). The volume was eventually printed as a crown octavo by T. and A. Constable, although after Yeats's first choice, Charles Shannon, had proved unobtainable to decorate the book, he had to accept a lesser figure, Herbert Granville Fell. Further, Yeats had specified the typography: "I like no headlines, the number of the page to be at the bottom, & single commas for quotation marks, & fairly large type but must leave type & the like to you
 
Page 142
& the printer, as I have no books here [in Sligo] to consult and compare."
The details of typesetting required attention of a different kind, manifest in some degree to author and printer alike, and depending not least on the state of the author's manuscript. Page design usually depended on established conventions and on comparisons with existing models, as Yeats realized. Spelling, punctuation, italicization, and capitalization were all, in principle at least, under the more direct control of the manuscript copytext. "I have been engaged in Comma's, Semicolons, Italic and Capital, to make Nonsense more pompous and Fabbelow [furbelow, adorn with showy ornament] bad Poetry, with good Printing," wrote Prior to Swift in 1718. Swift himself was alert to the ways in which typography could be exploited:
To Statesmen wou'd you give a wipe
You print it in Italick type.
When letters are in vulgar shapes,
'Tis ten to one the Wit escapes;
But when in Capitals exprest,
The dullest Reader smoaks the Jest:
Or else perhaps he may invent
A better than the Poet meant.
Swift's final admission, that the poet in fact may have less control over the reader than perhaps has been encouraged by careful articulation of words in their written and printed equivalents, does not deny the essential pointthat printing is a compromise of two different processes, one personal and one mechanical, and as a compromise, it is open to different interpretations.
Furthermore, because Swift and his generation were writing at a time when the use of capitals and italics was undergoing a profound change, such typographical variety itself lent them ammunition more powerful than had been available hitherto or was to be available subsequently. Capitalization and spelling, for example, were critical to the appearance (and hence reading and meaning) of
Paradise Lost
each is clearly marked on the surviving printer's copy, even though by this time in his life Milton himself was blind. Similarly, the distinction between roman, italic, and black-letter types had been exploited in
The Shepheardes Calender
by Edmund Spenser where the visual organization (including accompanying woodcuts) reflected the poetic and explanatory.
 
Page 143
Distinctions between italic and roman types mark out proper names in dozens of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century poems. For a quite different part of the reading public, until well into the second half of the seventeenth century, stanzas and refrains in black-letter street ballads might be marked off by their typographical differences, with the refrains printed in roman type. One of the few extended examples of sixteenth-century printer's copy, Sir John Harington's verse translation of Ariosto's
Orlando Furioso
(printed 1591) clearly distinguishesin its use of secretary and italic handwritingbetween the different typefaces to be used in the printed version. Harington's spelling was normalized in the printing house, just as in the next century Milton's spelling in his autograph manuscript of
Comus
would be in the printed version.
But the changing typographical environment of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with which Swift made such play, also created tensions between printer and author. Joseph Moxon, in his
Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing
(16831684)the first printer's manual to be published in Englandexplained in a celebrat-ed passage that a compositor "is strictly to follow his
Copy
, viz. to observe and do just so much and no more than his
Copy
will bear him out for; so that his
Copy
is to be his Rule and Authority: but the care-lesness of some good Authors, and the ignorance of other Authors, has forc'd
Printers
to introduce a Custom, which among them is look'd upon as a task and duty incumbent on the Compositer, viz. to discern and amend the bad
Spelling
and
Pointing
of his
Copy
."
Such instructions not only presupposed uniformity in the printing housea uniformity that had been so noticeably absent as recently as sixty years before among compositors in William Jaggard's printing house working on the Shakespeare First Folio (1623)but also suggested a more disciplined and uniform approach to the written language, in the shared practices of spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. "It behoves an Author," wrote Moxon in a separate passage, "to examine his
Copy
very well e're he deliver it to the
Printer
, and to Point it, and mark it so as the
Compositer
may know what Words to
Set
in
Italick,
English,
Capitals &c
." In 1755, seventy years after Moxon, another author of a printer's grammar, John Smith, explained that these responsibilities had been inverted, the author now expecting the printer to contribute that discipline which his manuscript lacked.
There are many instances of authors taking the most extreme care over the reproduction of their text in print: Alexander Pope (d. 1744) is

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