I keep meaning to write some things in general about the two anthologies aimed at children I’m featuring during this U.S. National Poetry Month: “A Girls Book of Verse”  (1922) and “A Boys Book of Verse”  (1923). NPM implies an American focus in its name — and these 1920s anthologies were published by an American publisher (Frederick A Stokes) with American editors (Mary Gould Davis & Helen Dean Fish) and they remained in print until at least the WWII years.

Long-time readers here will know that I have an affinity for the first quarter of the 20^th century as a literary era. It’s the time of Modernism’s emergence and triumph in the arts, and English language literary poetry was transformed largely by a group of Americans: Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, H. D., William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell et al.

How much of this is reflected in our two 1920’s anthologies?

Close to zero, zilch, nada, nothing,

There’s a single poem by Amy Lowell, “A Little Garden,”  a metered and rhymed poem that barely reflects her influence on a branch of Imagism, that indispensable early Modernist poetic movement. There is one Modernist with several poems included in the two anthologies — an American not in the above list, one that I’ll reveal later this month — but most of you won’t know that poet’s name.

This is not because the anthologists wanted to include only older poems from before America was in the game. Most of those published postdate America’s Whitman/Dickinson/Longfellow and the “Fireside poets” poetic emergence. Many of the poems are from the young 20^th century or the final years of the old century. OK, let’s quantify how many poems by U. S. poets are in this set of English language poetry from just about a century ago.*

I did a quick and dirty count of American’s poems in these two anthologies’ tables of contents. Remember, Americans are making these two books, and while they might have been sold overseas, I suspect American parents, libraries, and children were the intended audience. Are they going to be flying the red, white and blue from the library ramparts? Cheering the home team?

Apologies for the cursory numbers to follow. Even if I’m reasonably knowledgeable about poets of this era, there are a lot of unknown authors in these two books 237 poems. Stopping to search Pamela Tennant, Jean Ingelow, Cecil Roberts, Alice Meynell, and Young E. Allison, and the like would have delayed this post.**

Here’s the rough count: 42 poems with known U.S. authors. 150 written by known non-U. S. authors (almost all British Isles residents). The poems by unknowns (which still included those in the footnote below when I did the tally) counted as 42. Given the over 3-1 breakdown in the knowns, and the revealed makeup of the short sample of the unknowns, I expect the unknowns would break similar to the knowns.

So, there you have it: about a hundred years ago — within our parents’ and grandparents’ childhoods for many readers of this post — they easily could have gotten the idea that poetry was still largely a British thing. I was surprised at this lopsidedness. I’d also say that before reading through the anthologies this year I expected at least a smattering of the Modernists, though I’m not surprised by the overwhelming rhymed/syllabic metric poetry .

And then I remembered how poetry was taught to me as an American student. Modernism was acknowledged, though things seemed to stop at Frost and Yeats. The art started with Chaucer and Beowulf, quickly moved to the Tudor poets, and spend a fair amount of time on the 19^th century worthies that were included in these 1920s books.

However de-emphasized poetry may be in today’s America, I doubt we’d see such a disproportionate mix now. But before I end off today, I’ll reiterate what I wrote last time: I’m not that much of a literary nationalist, and so I’ll leave you with two non-American authors from this gendered pair of books of verse for children, two poems that speak of longing for their home nations. Both were written when the poets were no longer living in their birth countries, intensifying their poetic expressions. As I’m doing throughout this series, I’m asking you to guess if the poems appeared in the girls or boys book of verse.

The first is one of the most famous and best-loved poems to appear in the pair of books: William Butler Yeats “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”   I was at a poetry reading here in America this past Thursday night, and not just one, but two of the reading poets said that one of their own poems was inspired by this poem of Yeats. It’s such an Irish poem that it’s printed on the Irish passport. Yet the poem was written in London, by a man whose father had moved his family to England when the poet was only two. I performed this as part of this Project in 2019, and you can hear it here with this audio player — or if you don’t see the player, with this link.

Can you guess if it’s in the girls or boys book?

The second one, is by Robert Browning, who’d eloped off to Italy with his poetic life-partner Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He called his poem “Home Thoughts from Abroad”  and I recast it for singing and call my version “In England Now.”  My aim in my recasting was to make the dislocation from an ideal England seem less a matter of geography and more a matter of time and change. You can hear that version with the next audio player gadget, or with this link.

Was this floral longing poem in the girls or boys book?***

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Here at NPM2024 Field the British side has shown up to face the Modernist American 9. The Brits advantages: fine woolens, bats that could also be used in a pizza oven. Americans? Plenty of sharp Latin-American players, closer, more aerodynamic beard trims. Read the post for the score.

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*In case you’re wondering, I think the only translations from a non-English poet are a pair of William Cullen Bryant translations of Homer, and a KJV Song of Songs  excerpt.

**Anyone who knows me, knows that just typing this excuse makes me want to indeed do a web search for at least this quintet. I did. Results: only Allison is an American.

***Yeats’ poem of his bee-loud Mojo Dojo Casa Dream House was the leadoff poem in the “Girls Book of Verse.”  Browning’s poem of an April unaware for those who simply live in it was in both the boys and the girls volumes. So, if you’re keeping score, you guessed this second one correctly.