An Unapologetic Anthology

By Paul Gray

THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF ENGLISH LIGHT VERSE Edited by Kingsley Amis; Oxford; 347pages; $13.95

"Never apologize/ For what you anthologize." So, if anyone had thought of it, might run the motto for this entertaining and occasionally exasperating selection of poetic japes and fripperies. Novelist Kingsley Amis is not just a wickedly funny writer (read Lucky Jim several times); he is also a critic known for his strong and aggressively idiosyncratic opinions. With the venerable Oxford imprimatur on his side, Amis' poetastering now becomes what the next several generations of readers will have to swallow.

That will not be hard to do. Amis' anthology is almost totally unlike the first Oxford Book of Light Verse, compiled by W.H. Auden and published 40 years ago. For all its literary ground breaking and the recognition it brought to nonserious poetry, Auden's collection displayed crippling drawbacks: much of it was of the hey-nonny-nonny variety, and too much of it was not funny. This lapse was intentional. Auden saw humor as incidental to light verse; far more important, he claimed, was the quality of common speech that all classes of society could understand. Milton wrote for the educated elite; the light-versifier hummed to a simpler, more general rhythm and turned his hand to things like this:

My lady is a prety on, A prety, prety, prety on, My lady is a prety on As ever I saw.

Egalitarian principles aside, a little bit of this (and Auden printed a lot) goes a long, weary way.

Amis, on the other hand, does not give a rap about poetry for the masses. His aim, he writes, was to put together "a reactionary anthology," and he has succeeded. Defining light verse is like breaking the idea of a butterfly on the wheel, and Amis wisely avoids stating last words on the subject. But his general categories are small enough to exclude Chaucer, Skelton, Dryden, Pope, Burns and most of Edward Lear ("whimsical," Amis says, "to the point of discomfort"). Amis wants poems that raise "a good-natured smile." He argues that "light verse need not be funny, but what no verse can afford to be is unfunny." He stresses the technical hurdles that the light poet must erect and then clear; since he is up to something trivial, the artist must do it perfectly. "A concert pianist," Amis writes, "is allowed a wrong note here and there; a juggler is not allowed to drop a plate."

As Amis' introduction piles condition upon condition, the fear arises that his book will consist of blank pages. Instead, the anthology presents nearly 300 separate entries, the work of more than 120 poets. The only major writer to receive substantial space is Byron. Though it is preferable to read Don Juan whole, Amis' excerpts do underscore this long poem's consistent, sparkling hilarity. Byron on government bureaucrats is, unfortunately, still timely. Ask a neighbor, he advised:

When for a passport, or some other bar To freedom, he applied (a grief and a bore), If he found not in this spawn of tax born riches, Like lap dogs, the least civil sons of bitches.

Amis includes a respectable swatch of Jonathan Swift speculating on his coming demise and of T.S. Eliot musing on cats ("Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,/ There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity"). John Betjeman, England's reigning poet laureate, displays a light touch at vers de societe; Robert Graves is captured in several nonmythic moods. A couple of songs by Noeel Coward read less jauntily than they sing. Auden the anthologist did not let Auden the splendid comic poet into his book. Amis generously corrects this blunder.

But the leading lights of Amis' collection are frequently less than well known. One of the book's funniest poems, period, is an ironic encomium to an organ grinder by C.S. Calverley (1831-84). A typical stanza:

Tell me by what art thou bindest On thy feet those ancient shoon: Tell me, Grinder, if thou grindest Always, always out of tune.

Desmond Skirrow (1924-76) uses but twelve well-chosen words in Ode on a Grecian Urn summarized:

Gods chase Round vase. What say? What play? Don't know. Nice, though.

Amis also shows a knack for presenting familiar poets in unfamiliar guises. He dutifully includes not only Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky but also a dead-on parody of Hiawatha: ("From his shoulder Hiawatha/ Took the camera of rosewood--/ Made of sliding, folding rosewood ..."). A.E. Housman's familiar Hellenic manner is turned inside out in his version of a hilariously mistranslated Greek tragedy: "O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots/ Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom/ Whence by what way how purposed art thou come..."

Amis' editorial quirkiness digs up much of value that would otherwise have stayed buried. But there is madness in his method. He is happiest being outrageous, and the best way to do that in his native England is to mock liberal pieties. Amis' convincing impersonation of a Colonel Blimp drifting rightward obliges him to include several mediocre poetic slaps at the left that simply do not meet his own standards. He gives space to a few Americans, including Bret Harte, Robert Frost, Peter de Vries and the late Phyllis McGinley. But he omits John Updike, who, when he chooses to be, is probably the best writer of light verse alive.

Given the speed with which Oxford anthologies become holy writ, Amis' peculiarities are regrettable. It is impossible, though, to pull a long face at his collection. The poems he assembles are pleasing, instructive and full of laughter. Even the index of first lines is surreally madcap. Take the sad little story told in the first five:

A lesbian girl of Khartoum A maiden there lived in a large market-town A scandal or two A tail behind, a trunk in front A tangled web indeed we weave

--Paul Gray

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