A Pageant of Poetry

...The horror drew all classes together as they struggled to find expression—often poetic—for a society in chaos...

...Poetry helped shape the dialects that began to coalesce into a common tongue, and Schmidt chronicles that development...

...After describing the short, tragic life of Thomas Chatterton—who, while still a teenager, invented an anachronistic alter ego and wrote poetry in a Medieval mode that fooled experts, then committed suicide because he could not be successful as himself—Schmidt tells an even sadder story...

...The Spanish Civil War, then World War II smashed their idols, leaving a poetry that, in Auden's words, takes "short views" so as not to make embarrassing mistakes...

...Yet there is something quite poignant about Schmidt's account of this bright, capable woman who could not quite rise above her circumstances...

...The qualities that make her work seem naive have nothing to do with gender, he demonstrates, but rather show the difficulties of using Elizabethan literary forms in the age of John Donne...

...It would be wrong, however, to characterize Schmidt as primarily a detractor...

...The most powerful sections of Lives of the Poets are those that praise, bringing out aspects of a poem that most of us tend to overlook...

...None of her proficient but unremarkable poems give us an insight into her personal situation...

...At the same time, he manages, in a wonderfully fresh and nonacademic fashion, to lay out some important critical observations about the nature of verse...

...Schmidt's chapters on William Cullen Bryant, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edward Arlington Robinson manage to convey a deeper sense of these men and their writing than any large biography has done...

...Schmidt is able to create a richly colored mural depicting these early bards of our language...

...Schmidt's approach illustrates that by writing against the grain of one's own age, a poet can sometimes earn recognition from future audiences...

...Schmidt's tastes and views are equally individualistic and powerfully stated...

...They might have been written by any skilled imitator of the prevailing modes, largely modeled on Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray and the Evangelical hymnists...

...Had she lived in a later period, she might have been able to tell her own story, and perhaps have become a significant poet instead of merely a polished one...

...The rural poor knew nature to be a harsher mistress than their wealthier and more leisured countrymen realized...

...Schmidt, the founder of Carcanet Press and editor of PN Review, is one of Great Britain's most provocative men of letters...

...An American involved with the current literary world here will notice many Quixotic judgments and omissions...

...Schmidt's volume is not without faults...

...Names from the shadowy beginnings of the English Renaissance such as John Gower, William Langland and Thomas Hoccleve ring the faintest of bells in our memories today...

...Thomas Lovell Beddoes and John Ashbery's unpredictable use of syntax...

...His own publications have long encouraged mavericks to make their voices heard...

...Its aim is nothing less than to cover the entire history of poetry written in English, including the literary traditions of the United States, Canada, Australia, and occasionally other former colonies of the British Empire where the Queen's language is spoken...

...Yeats' "worst" book, In the Seven Woods (1904), is full of "an excess picked up like a virus from Swinburne...

...When F. R. Leavis snottily pronounced that the 18th-century English minister George Crabbe was "hardly the fine point of consciousness of his time," C. H. Sisson responded, "What an excellent thing not to have been...

...The Industrial Revolution that brought cheaper goods to some, frequently bankrupted the cottage industries of the less fortunate and destroyed their way of life...

...Coleridge's mellifluous, Romantic voice...

...Alas, soon after her return to Boston, the Wheatleys died...

...Though admiring some work of the Scottish Hugh MacDiarmid, he still finds in it that "the sublime and the ridiculous are next-door neighbors...

...Most of his opinions are judicious, as when he tells us, "A healthy critical environment would encourage growth and change in a way that an appreciative market, hungry for more of the same, never can...

...Fair enough, yet when he lashes out, again and again, at lyrical writers like Swinburne and Thomas, many readers will find his animus unfair...

...Although he extends "poetry in English" to cultures outside Britain, his perspective is nonetheless shaped by the tastes of his adopted country...

...Lives of the Poets operates on a number of equally engaging levels...

...About the 17th century's social historian, John Aubrey, whose Brief Lives has long been one of the primary sources for the personalities of Tudor and Stuart poets, he declares, "If there is dirt to be dished, and even if there isn't, we can trust Aubrey to dish it...

...One of this volume's more valuable achievements is its making the pageant of poetry in English corneal ive in a sweeping panorama: Chaucer with his forked beard and medieval leggings...

...Indeed, the author's dislikes inspire his most cutting metaphors...

...Phillis Wheatley was an American slave, another version of 18th-century resourcefulness and failure...

...Before that, a peasant from the North couldn't understand the speech of one from the South...

...The educated from different parts of England communicated in French, the language of the Norman conquerors, or in Latin, the lingua franca of Medieval Europe...

...When the late Joseph Brodsky switches from his native Russian to attempting verse in English, the results are damned as "a centipede with many elbows and very few wrists...

...If you want to follow the contemporary literary scene over there, he cannot be ignored, because some of the most interesting, offbeat work appears in his publications...

...She assimilated it so well that by the age of 13 she was writing her own verses in that style...

...He points up, for instance, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Wallace Stevens' musical sense of language...

...Writing about the contemporaries of W. H. Auden, Schmidt says, "[This] generation was disillusioned because it had illusions...

...Certain schools of poetry do not resonate with Schmidt...

...One is literary...

...Schmidt detests Dylan Thomas, whose influence he compares to a toxic substance, choking the voices of many poets who came after...

...Sir Philip Sydney in padded doublet...

...Somewhat surprisingly, he was born and grew up in Mexico...

...Even if you simply want to brush up your Shakespeare—and the rest of English Lit.—here is the book to help you do so: Lives of the Poets by Michael Schmidt (Knopf, 975 pp., $35.00...

...and Robinson Jeffers and Ted Hughes' belief that violence, lust, incest, and perversity are natural impulses...

...George Herbert in his parson's robes...

...humpbacked Alexander Pope...

...The closer he comes to the present age, the clearer this is...

...But Schmidt makes many intriguing historical observations along the way...

...In a similar vein, Schmidt shrewdly says about Colonial America's first poet, Anne Bradstreet, "Her literary culture was arrested in 1630 when she set sail" from England...

...Offbeat yet telling comparisons also illuminate our understanding of various writers...

...How many false hopes did this solid and pertinacious observer decline to share...

...Her poetic gift went unnoticed following her early success...

...On your winter vacation, take Lives of the Poets to the beach...

...Born in Africa, she was brought to America and purchased by a Boston tailor named Wheatley...

...He and his wife taught her English and Latin, and introduced her to English poetry...

...Phyllis' marriage to a freed slave was not a success...

...He met his end in debtors' prison, while she struggled to support their surviving child, then died in poverty at 31...

...Crabbe, who is best known as the author of "Peter Grimes," the poem on which Benjamin Britten based his opera, holds his place in the anthologies because his vision was sharper than that of the poets who concentrated on "improving" themes...

...Still, Schmidt is always entertaining, even in his moments of biased venting...

...But he is no less persuasive when arguing a case for such neglected poets as the Tudor George Gascoigne, the Victorian Charlotte Mew, Auden's contemporary George Barker, the modernist Mina Loy, and the Anglo-Indian Sujata Bhatt...

...So, probably, would a Canadian, an Australian or a Caribbean islander...

...It is as much a pageturner as many lengthy blockbuster novels, and will keep you avidly reading about the colorful procession of writers who comprise the story of poetry in English...

...Like his hero, Johnson, Schmidt's astute critical sense deepens our reading of even overexposed poems...

...At 20, she published a successful book of poetry and traveled to England where she was lionized...

...Lives of the Poets—as most will recognize—takes its title from Samuel Johnson's quirky, opinionated account of some of his own precursors and contemporaries...

...Schmidt does not quite start off with Beowulf, he begins in the 14th century, when "modern" English came into use...

...Don't expect a pedestrian slog, full of bland, hand-me-down observations from secondary sources...

...the "bearded, attentive Florence Nightingale figure" of Walt Whitman—all appear not as cartoonish characters but as writers whose work continues to speak intimately to us...

...Modern English, for example (as opposed to Old English, or Anglo-Saxon), owes its birth to the Black Death, which crossed the channel in 1348 and in a few years shrank the population of the British Isles by a third...

...Like Johnson, Schmidt enthralls readers with very human stories of writers...

...Or maybe, like some of us, your years in higher education coincided with the era of the New Critics, when systematic study was anathema and many periods of literature were not read at all...

...We don't even know whether she continued writing...

...While his contemporaries were extolling Nature and Man's Progress, Crabbe doggedly described the poverty-stricken lives, thwarted ambitions, and mental as well as physical illnesses of his parishioners...