Beside earlier centuries, the twentieth in this account is overcrowded with poets. And yet it is not crowded enough. There are significant absences, as in the earlier centuries, for which amends will have to be made another time.
Or is the account too full, the approach too tolerant? Breaks in transmission have thinned out the poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Time and fashion have winnowed the poets in Doctor Johnson’s Lives. The late Victorians have sunk under the weight of their collected works. Should a historian not do the winnowing of time and fashion for readers today? There are certainly a dozen poets of this century whose work will be taken off the shelves or accessed on the flickering screens of the twenty-third century. It’s almost clear who those poets will be. But as soon as one tries to give them context, that context consists of other poets who have claims on our attention.
Books about poetry either limit the period they cover or concentrate on a theme. My history is peculiar in that it is written by a reader who—though he teaches in a university—distrusts critical specialism. The real academic work, that of the scholar, is necessarily specialized and of great value in establishing and recovering texts, but many academic critics only feel confident in judgment in a specific period, or drive a theoretical skewer through poetry, investing their faith not in a poem but in a predetermined approach to poetry.
It is an act of folly, I now know, to undertake so large a task as this. What fueled it from the outset was a fierce and sometimes partisan enthusiasm for specific poems. I like the way that poems connect with one another and weave a larger pattern. A living poem can energize another poem at five hundred years’ distance, or across the other side of the world. For the most part I follow chronology in this history, knowing how unfashionable in academic circles it now is to plot such a course. But it is only against a sense of chronology, of developing styles, that the surprise of what was once genuinely new can be understood, its abiding value inferred.
What cannot be inferred, however, is future direction. The twentieth century is so diverse, the new technologies so volatile, that the historian is wary of becoming a prophet. No one could have predicted the enormous achievement of Chaucer, Spenser or Ben Jonson. After Jonson, certain definable lines emerge and there is for a time a progressive logic in chronology, which breaks down in the second half of the eighteenth century and is never restored. A historian can be a prophet after the event, making the case for neglected writers. Swinburne and then T. S. Eliot restored Donne, for instance, and Laura Riding is not alone in having tried to restore Charles Doughty, whose time may yet come. But “may yet come” begins to sound like prophesy; for his time to come it will take a poet rather than a critical advocate to resurrect him.
We can predict that the questions that arise out of religious belief or doubt, out of history, politics, economics, out of anxiety, sexual desire or frustration, love or hate, will continue to exercise poets to come. So too will the nature of language, what can and cannot be said and formed. Answers will come, if at all, not in poetic theories and poets’ essays, grand statements or aphorisms—things that occur after the crisis and the creative event. Answers will come in poems, not as argument but as form. Even in those poems that contain argument, what matters as poetry is form, how words work together, the sounds and silences their combination makes, the ordered effects they produce in the attentive hearer. This is what survives when argument goes stale, when the rules of play change, when the poem’s occasion is lost.