Beyond the poets I’ve been discussing, the AmblesideOnline Poetry Anthology also includes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier and Paul Laurence Dunbar, all of whom appear in volume five.
While the Longfellow selection includes a number of poems that describe children and childhood thinking and natural objects and events from the viewpoint of children or from a more general viewpoint similar to what we identify as childlike thinking,, they often move to taking strong stances on matters like hope, kindness, and consolation and are intermixed with poems that offer such strong stances throughout.
As I read them, the poems in the Whittier selection do more or less the same thing in more or less the same way; and the Dunbar selection begins with a poem in celebration of Whittier:
Great poets never die, for Earth
Doth count their lives of too great worth
To lose them from her treasured store;
So shalt thou live for evermore --
Though far thy form from mortal ken --
Deep in the hearts and minds of men.
Not surprisingly, then, Dunbar’s poems offer yet more descriptions of natural events and objects as the base for conveying his own feelings and arriving at meaningful understandings of them. Unlike the other poets, however, the events and objects Dunbar focuses on tend to be less happy ones—dark moments of violence or destruction that then allow him to focus on his plight as a Black man in America.
I find myself especially appreciating these Dunbar poems exactly because they are so unlike all the rest. As I think about my responses to all the others, I become embarrassingly aware of how constantly negative those responses are. Part of this is, clearly, taste: I am not a fan of the attitudes these poets seem to share and seem determined to make poetry of. But the basis of my objection to them here is not so much the attitudes they share as the fact that they also pretty entirely share them—that as a whole, these early volumes of Ambleside series exhibit a profoundly limited view of what poetry is and what it does.
While the series continues to cover all the years of school through the end of high school, Ambleside does not offer collections of the poets it recommends for them past Year 6.
As for Year 6: the poems it offers by the rustically inclined Frost and Sandburg, two poets born in the 1800s but who lived on into the twentieth century, have more in common with the nineteenth century poets of their earlier lives than the “modern” poetry of their later years. And while it probably has something to do with copyright issues, it’s intriguing that the Year 6 volume does not include the work of the third major poet identified by Ambleside: Langston Hughes. Hughes’ poems mostly represent a far more urban world than any of the poets I’ve named so far. They are not so focussed on natural events and objects, and they offer a far less comforting and optimistic view of what it feels like to be alive. Of the poets recommended for study in these Ambleside volumes, Hughes stands out as the only one who seems somewhat in tune with the world the intended audience of children living now experience (or in some homes (like the ones that use Ambleside), need to be insulated from).
Beyond Year 6, though things begin to change quite drastically. Here’s what Ambleside recommends:
Year 7
Oxford Book of English Verse or other anthology
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, especially Idylls of the King
John Keats
OR, use for all 3 terms: The Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Arthur Quiller CouchYear 8
Roy Maynard’s Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves, based on Spencer's Fairie Queene
John Donne and George Herbert
John Milton
OR, use for all 3 terms: The Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Arthur Quiller CouchYear 9
Alexander Pope
William Cowper and Phillis Wheatley
George Gordon, Lord Byron
OR, use for all 3 terms: The Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Arthur Quiller CouchYear 10
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman
OR, use for all 3 terms: The Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Arthur Quiller CouchYear 11
A good contemporary anthology such as Norton's [I assume this means The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair]
Edna St. Vincent MillayYear 12
Luci Shaw
Wendell Berry
Wislawa Szymborsk
What’s intriguing here is how, as the years pass, there’s a gradual shift from almost exclusively “childlike” Romantic and Victorian poems from the nineteenth century to a wide range of different kinds of poems from different eras across the history of English poetry. As a whole, then, students who experience the entire Ambleside curriculum would finish high school with a pretty good overview of the history of English poetry.
In fact, the curriculum laid out here sounds suspiciously similar to the one I studied myself as a university undergraduate in an Honour English programme in the early 1960s. Over the four years of that programme, I took courses that were meant to provide me with exactly this kind of overview.
But by and large, nowadays, English departments have moved away from offering that sort of history-based education, and instead offer courses that focus far more on specific topics (e.g. the environment or war poetry) or on specific authors or kinds of author (e.g., women or queer authors). There is rarely much of an attempt to establish a canon of unfailingly important literature that everyone ought to know or admire. Once more, then, Ambleside is in the business of transforming contemporary youngsters into successful denizens of the more certain nineteen-sixties world of my memory—a world that, outside my memory and outside their own intimate circle of fellow Amblesiders, has ceased to exist.
One further note: In the sixties, I did not study Luci Shaw, Wendell Berry, or Wislawa Szymborska in 1960, in part, I think, because Wikipedia identifies Shaw as “a Christian writer of poetry and essays” and quotes Berry identifying himself as “an agrarian, a pacifist, and a Christian.” As for Szymborska, Chad P. Stutz argues in his article “Wisława Szymborska, Adolf Hitler, and Boredom in the Classroom; or, How Yawning Leads to Genocide” in the Christian Scholars Review that poems by Symborska “offer helpful insights” into contemporary boredom in order “to persuade Christian teachers in particular to approach boredom as something more than a localized, superficial issue so that they may, in turn, encourage their students to do likewise.” What makes these three poets specifically appealing to people focused on their own Christian faith and intent on passing it on might well have been the very qualities that made them not mainstream enough for the kind of mainstream education I once received.
At the end of the Ambleside poetry curriculum, there is one further category: Canadian Poets. I’ll say more about that in the next posting.