As I browse through all the treasuries of children’s poetry that I’ve come across, I suddenly realize that none of them were published in the twenty-first century. In fact, the only recent children’s treasury I could find listed on the Amazon website is Charles Ghigna’s Father Goose Treasury of Poetry, published in 2023. But the “101 Favorite Poems for Children” announced in its subtitle are all by Ghigna himself. While anthologies continue to be published, it seems that “treasuries” are out of fashion now, and have been for some time.
On the other hand, though, I have three anthologies that identify themselves as “new treasuries.”
They are:
A New Treasury of Children’s Poetry: Old Favourites ands New Discoveries (1984), selected and introduced by Joanna Cole
A New Treasury of Poetry compiled by Neil Philip and identified as being “for the young” on the front flap of its dust jacket (1990)
The New Oxford Treasury of Children’s Poems, selected and arranged by Michael Harrison and Christopher Stuart-Clark, which justifies its title by having been published in 1995, seven years after Harrison and Clark’s The Oxford Treasury of Children’s Poems (1988).
The obvious question is, so what’s new about them? The answer, by and large, is . . . almost nothing.
Nothing much at all.
The front flap of the dust jacket for Harrison and Stuart-Clark’s The New Oxford Treasury identifies it as “a companion volume to the best-selling The Oxford Treasury of Children’s Poems.” But while it contains an entirely different set of poems, it presents them in more or less the same way. The books are the same size and printed on similarly glossy paper. They each contain a variety of illustrations in a variety of styles by a long list of different artists, more than thirty in the first volume and eleven in the second, so that they are anthologies of both poems and illustrations. Some of the illustrations are in black and white and many are in colour. Some of the illustrations are moodily impressionistic—but enough depict children and other people and animals in relatively simple cartoon-like styles to create a first impression and eventually an overall atmosphere of lighthearted fun that invites a view of poetry as lighthearted fun. As, then, suitable for children?
But not all the poems are fun or funny, even though the overall atmosphere invites a conclusion that even reading less happy poems or looking at less happy pictures is a fun thing to do—or perhaps, the light-hearted context for them simply undercuts the seriousness of their solemnity and deflects attention from it. They’re poems! they’re fun! That’s all you need to know!
The poems sometimes appear alone on a page or even on a two-page spread, along with an illustration, and sometimes appear two or three to a page and printed on top of or arranged beside or above or below different illustrations. Both volumes also print poems along with fun illustrations on their inside front and back covers.
A snippet from the Times Educational Supplement on the front flap of the dust jacket of the first volume happily asserts that there is “plenty of rampant visual jollity.” The publishers who chose to quote this snippet seem to think that this is praise—but doesn't “rampant” usually imply that there’s too much of something? I think it does. I think the visual jollity its indeed rampant here, and not in a good way.
Neither volume contains separate sections identified as such by titles describing their subjects. But the poems appear in sequences that places poems on similar topics before and after each other, thus creating sequences despite their lack of labels; and the sequence of poems in both volumes is similar.
Each begins with a series of shorter poems, many of them originally not from printed sources but from what has come to be identified as nursery rhymes or as what adults have overheard children say in playgrounds, all here labelled as being by Anonymous. Each volume ends with a series of poems about night and going to sleep. In between, there are sequences of poems that all describe children thinking about themselves, or about relatives, or about other people, and other sequences about being in nature, or about people travelling and having adventures. Not all the topics are present in both volumes, but some are; and nonsense poems are interspersed with realistic ones on similar subjects in both volumes, as are old favourites and more recent poems. They end up seeming more chaotic than orderly.
By and large, then, the two books offer a similar overall experience but with different poems that nevertheless comes to represent a very similar view of what poetry is. The overall effect of both books is a paradoxical combination of variety in the poems and the overall effect of rampant visual jollity created by the visual aspects of the books. A brief reconsideration of all the poetry anthologies for children I’ve looked at reveals that many of them—and just about all of them published more recently—represent the same paradox: poetic variety, visual sameness undermining it. I’ll say more about that in a later posting. Meanwhile, despite the claim in the second volume’s title, there’s nothing all that new here.
The front flap of the dust jacket for Philip’s New Treasury makes a quite different claim about what makes it new:
This selection . . . promises to define for a new generation the nature of the English poetic tradition.”
Apparently, a new generation needs a new tradition? So tradition keeps changing along with the passage of time? Somehow, that seems counterintuitive. I mean, isn’t tradition, like, traditional? But hey, maybe isn’t.
Philip’s “Introduction” makes a somewhat different claim about newness, one that doesn’t ground his choice of poems in the need for a new tradition; indeed, he insists that “true poetry, from the simplest to the most challenging, never loses its appeal.” Instead of challenging tradition, then, Philip’s focuses in on the personal nature of his own responses:
I have kept this quality of lasting freshness in mind while making my choice. Newly-encountered poems which appealed to me on first reading had to continue to do so; poems which I remembered with joy from my early reading had to thrill me still. There is no poem in this book which does not make me shiver with pleasure as I read it.
What s new, then, is the injection of Neil Philip and his personal values into an attempt to define what poetry ought to matter for young readers and listeners and why it matters —with, of course, the implication that what matters to him ought to matter to everybody, especially children.
Cole makes an even more intense commitment to the personal nature of her choices:
I have not tried to make an "objective" collection, including all the classic and contemporary poems that children "ought" to know. Instead, I have chosen poetry that made me stop, feeling full of the brightness of the images or the joyousness of the rhythm or the recognition of a hidden feeling. When I felt myself lifted above the ordinary, I had the impulse to share the experience with others.
Both Cole and Philip claim that their personal experience in response to poems is something that sounds an awful lot to me like religious awe: what thrills them and makes them shiver with pleasure or fills them with joy, what lifts them above the ordinary.
This insistence on what matters to Cole and Philip personally reminds me of Riding and Graves’s description of the kind of anthology they identify as “a strictly non-professional, non-purposive collection, such as the poet’s or amateur’s scrapbook” For Riding and Graves, “the virtue of such an anthology diminishes with their increase in the number of persons for whom it is made,” and they severely criticize Walter Del Mare’s 1923 Come Hither anthology because the poems included in it “are so honestly Mr. De la Mare's favourite poems that they seem a mere extension of the De la Mare atmosphere backwards through English Poetry,” and thus represent “a tyranny which no personality has a right to exercise over the reader.”
But if de la Mare was being a tyrant in representing his own taste as definitive as far back in 1923, then the new aspect of Cole and Philip’s New Treasuries is not the fact that they make personal choices. Instead, it is the specific personality those choices represent. And in fact, every editor who selects poems for an anthology inevitably reflects his own taste and his own values in the selections and inevitably recommends them as excellent simply by including them.
The only possible exception I can think of is Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz’s Americans’ Favourite Poems (2000), in which the poems are ones selected by people in the United States who responded to Pinsky’s request as the then Poet Laureate of the nation to write to him about their own favourite poems as part of what the subtitle identifies as “The Favourite Poem Project.”
Each of the poems in this volume is accompanied by a comment from and a description of the specific individual American who chose it. While the contributor include a number of children —a seven-year-old, a ten-year-old, three eleven-year-olds, three twelve-year olds, and a large bunch of teenagers—most of them are a varied group of adults of every age up into the nineties, including a professor of cognitive science, a handyman, a bookkeeper, an artist, various college students, and a retired nurse. So I guess I have to think of it as an anthology for adult readers—or perhaps, as a number of other anthologies explicitly announce themselves to be, an anthology for families, with audiences that include both adults and children. I’ll be talking about family collections of this sort in a later posting.
But American’s Favourite Poems contains only 200 poems, and Pinsky and Dietz report in the “Introduction” that they received “thousands of letters” about Americans’ favourites. The editors have selected from what the thousand of respondents selected. Furthermore, they acknowledge in their introduction that their selection represents not only what Americans in general selected, but also, their own efforts to create “an anthology of literary interest.” I suspect that means that poems various American selected but that Pinsky and Dietz didn’t approve of or, maybe, simply found embarrassing or over-sentimental or silly didn’t make the cut. Not surprisingly, then, the only names on the cover are those of the editors, the Poet Laureate in larger print than the mere director of the project. Expertise and clout still rule.
Perhaps not surprisingly, then, American’s Favourite Poems turn out to be not much different from other poetry anthologies: it may not call itself a treasury, but it is a collection in which often anthologized poems significantly predominate over less widely known ones. The editors share the assumptions about what kinds of poems matter—what ones to treasure—with the majority of anthologists for the last century or so. But whether or not they actually represent what Americans generally treasure in the way of poems remains an open question.
What does seem clear, though, is that anthologies of poetry, whether they claim to have been selected by non-professionals or identify themselves as significantly new and different in other ways, and whether intended for children, for families, or for adults, tend to be more like each other than not. I have to conclude that new treasuries are not really new in any particularly important way and that what treasures they include are often the same old treasures.