What’s Behind The Treasuries?

This essay was prompted by a review by the Scottish poet, Robert Crawford, of Clare Bucknell’s recent book, The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture (2023). It provides a reading of Bucknell’s book in the light of other anthologies. So it is not in itself a review but, rather, a series of reflections on the construction and nature of anthologies stimulated by my reading of Bucknell’s book. Crawford insists on the omissions in Bucknell’s account from a Scottish perspective. But I want to take in a wider perspective, one that includes national identity. Initially, I focus on the index and on the entry for Palgrave’s father and his Jewish name. This leads to a discussion on the authoritative appearance of The Golden Treasury and perhaps on what it is hiding. The essay takes issue with the partial view of English poetry, where Wordsworth is afforded the most poems, and eighteenth-century poets hardly feature. The second half discusses Bucknell’s chapter on the popularity of poetry therapy and her omission of any discussion of recent women’s poetry. The anthology she dismisses out of hand is Yeats’s The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935. Such a conclusion invites a response at some length. The focus then shifts to another Irish writer, William Allingham, and his largely forgotten anthology, Nightingale Valley, which was published the year before The Golden Treasury and which Palgrave sought to better. In his thought-provoking choices, which includes possibly the first printing of Blake’s poems in an anthology, Allingham provides a counter to those who read poetry and literature simply in terms of the way they reflect history. In doing so he affords a valuable critique of The Treasuries and The Golden Treasury from over a century and a half ago.