Poetry means the canon of Western poetry in English augmented by that in other languages that fed into the process of arriving at where it finds itself now, from the point of view of an English poetry academic, of which John Carey is the doyen.
Thus beginning nearly 4000 years ago with The Epic of Gilgamesh, he provides a sweep through all those names one thinks of as 'canonical', even if in recent years there have been suggestions that there should be no such thing, as well as a cast of supporting names that many won't be familiar with. I wasn't. Being still alive appears to disqualify any poet that might have been included had they not been which leaves one thinking who they would be, or if Carey isn't prepared to confer such legitimacy on the living. But one can hardly imagine the job being done more succinctly, covering the necessary ground as best it can in such a short space and giving a sense of how the history twisted, turned and developed and how some of the poets relate to some of the others.
If you want to know how poetry managed to back itself into quite such a branch line of contemporary culture, you might have to read between the lines because it doesn't say. Perhaps it doesn't think it has.
Those who get chapters entirely to themselves, if that were an indicator of elite status, are Chaucer, Donne, Milton and Yeats. Ted and Sylvia share, as do Keats and Shelley. Auden has Spender (possibly the luckiest to get his name in) and MacNeice for company. Larkin doesn't quite dominate his chapter as much as one might think, with Gunn and Betjeman among his room-mates. Shakespeare has Marlowe and Sidney for company with Spenser bracketed with Wyatt, many of whose poems are 'unremarkable', and others.
Auden is regarded by many critics as,
the greatest English-language poet since Wordsworth,
and presumably those critics are those that think Wordsworth was the greatest English poet working back from Auden. I'm not saying I disagree but you would have gone past Keats and the more worthwhile bits of Tennyson to get there. Not much persuaded me to do all that C18th reading I've been putting off for so long despite Pope being quotable. My own idiosyncratic canon mirrors Eliot's rediscovery of 'metaphysical' poetry which, it says here, wasn't metaphysical at all because that implies it was, in the case of Donne,
interested in propounding abstruse philosophy, and he was not.
But I'm not convinced that's what it was meant to mean. I remember being asked 40 years ago, at University, what it meant and referring to Marvell's The Gallery and seeming to get away with it.
Halfway through the book we arrive at Tennyson who is not halfway through those 4000 years but that is only the same effect as the brightest stars in the sky being mostly those that are closest to us. As with our view of any such genre there seem to be more things closer to us worthy of our attention (see footnote). Without wanting to complain officially, I was disappointed that Wulf and Eadwacer didn't get a mention, and Fulke Greville might have crept in as well as a few more Romans but Carey has conspicuously and conscientiously extended the canon he would have been brought up with to include an alternative C18th, women and ethnic minorities that redress the weird, old certainties of a white male syllabus.
German, French and Russian poetries are apparently included for how they impacted on Modernism in English rather than any attempt to see poetry as something that occurs in all languages. And then, after that shockwave, there are as many American names as English and international 'big names' from other anglophone places but one can see the difficulties of living up to a title like this book has.
I was glad to see the hymn writers given their due, whose poetry was tremendous in the same way as cathedral architecture is tremendous, irrespective of its intentional tribute to God.
But two things came to my notice that it might not have been Prof. Carey's intention to stress.
In Wordsworth, Edward Thomas and others, there is a recurrent impulse to return to 'the real language of men', by which he meant 'of people', including Dorothy. Poetry seems to default to sounding daft if nobody ever tries to reset it.
And poetry's intention is to go beyond itself, to be more than its language. And it's really only any good when it achieves that.
What Carey can be thanked for is pointing out that Thomas Hardy,
seems to have realized, earlier than T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, that something drastic was needed to renovate English poetry.
It's been a while since I said here how the much maligned (in places) 'mainstream' is liberal, inclusive, democratic and is actually all there is. Each generation brings with it another set of self-styled upstarts who think they are revolutionaries, in the same way that teenagers of any period think they invented sex and their ancestors didn't get it. But they did. The mainstream is constantly shifting and accepting of the new, if and when it is worthwhile. It is the autocratic avant-gardistes who consign themselves to the status of passing fads. Ask Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
It's a brilliant book, easy to read and non-academic, that both benefits and suffers from being as little as it is on such a big subject.
Footnote. Let's not include pop music in that. We all have our own standpoint for pop music, like September 1971, for instance.