David Perkins (1) (1928–)

What's not to like? Beautifully written, comprehensive, fair without being bland. It's definitely written as a defense of modern poetry, so 'romantic' and associated terms are criticisms, which might not be perfectly reasonable. But you have to write from some perspective, and it's not like he hides it. Highly, highly recommended: you're guaranteed to feel like reading the poets he writes about, although the longer chapters dedicated to the major figures - Eliot, Pound and Yeats - aren't show more quite as much fun as the survey chapters. No matter. Can't wait for volume II. show less

Hefty anthologies, designed as textbooks for college courses in English literature — one would hardly expect one of them to appear on someone’s list of most meaningful reading experiences. Well, there’s one that would go at the top of my list. It’s crammed with good memories, for it was my textbook for old English 365, probably my most rewarding teaching experience. Leafing through its pages — it’s an old book now, shelf-worn and water-damaged, but with all those marginal notes show more and that underlining (whole lectures are embedded in these pencil marks)—I remember a generation of good students, lively classes, assignments and lectures that went well, tributes from students after the class was over. Somewhere I think I still have an old folder I kept in the bottom right-hand drawer of my desk, labeled “What makes it all worthwhile.” It is filled with students’ memories. Once, browsing through a yard sale, I found a folder of notes from my class being offered. I suppose I should have been embarrassed that someone had been willing to part with them. Insead I took pride that they had been kept and were considered worthy of passing along. I almost bought them myself, to compare them with the bulging folder of my own. I could never teach a course the same way twice, but I always kept copious notes, thinking that I might use them again. Ah, talk about good old days!

But, aside from sentimental memories, this is the model of what such anthologies should be like—a professional and critical tour de force. Edited by David Perkins, English Romantic Writers, (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967, 1265pp.) is a standard in the field. According to the price stamped on the end papers, I paid $14.60 for it. The second edition now lists for $139.95, and some dealers list it at an even higher price. Abebooks currently shows about a dozen copies of the original for around $25, a few in excellent condition with little or no highlighting and underlining. That’s a steal. Grab it while you can.

Bound sturdily in a maroon cloth, it includes the work of twenty English writers whose major works appeared between 1798 and 1832 (please note: this edition was published in 1967; none of the major writers included are women). Of course, the writers given the most space are Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley (not Mary), and John Keats—the ones I focused on in the course. No excerpts from novelists of the period are included. There are generous samplings, however, from the prose works of Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Thomas de Quincey, and others, and a few selections of poets from George Crabbe to John Clare. Students in my course were probably required to read no more than twenty percent of the text, but what a wealth of ancillary material was there for their examination: letters, journals, reviews, and reminiscences by and about the major writers. A good assignment permitted each student to select one of the minor writers from the same period, especially those noted for their association with, influence on, or difference from those now recognized as major; for example, Sir Walter Scott’s poetry, Robert Southey (the long term poet laureate of this generation), Thomas Moore, Leigh Hunt (editor and mentor), Thomas de Quincey (famous as “an Opium-Eater”), Thomas Love Peacock (with his “Four Ages of Poetry”), and the rural poet John Clare, writing in and through his insanity.

Why do I have such high regard for this text? Let’s take a closer look at the section devoted to William Wordsworth as an example. Perkins’ introductions are fine critical essays in their own right, written in a style that invites readers’ engagement with the author, his life, work, and critical significance. It’s almost as if you are hearing from someone who knew the authors personally. Here’s how he begins his comments on Wordsworth: “To most people Wordsworth did not look like a poet. He had nothing of Shelley’s ethereal delicacy of feature. He could not, like Byron, be protrayed as a corsair. He lacked even the rapt expression and massive forehead of Coleridge, the outward symbols of genius and learning. Yet his countenance could be romanticized. There was something formidable about it — the wide slash of the mouth, the commanding nose, the fierce eyes, ‘half burning, half smoldering, with an acrid fixture of regard.’ Though capable of utmost delicacy in feeling and affection, his character was independent, craggy, intense, brooding, and inward.” As much as I’ve read about Wordsworth, I cannot imagine a more apt or succinct introduction to the man.

A generous selection of Wordsworth’s poetry is included, all the way from some of his earliest efforts to excerpts from The Excursion, published in 1820, with a few later poems, including a lyric he wrote when he was seventy-five that invites comparison with “Lines Written in Early Spring.” Most selections have a headnote, not interpretation or critical comment so much as information that will support one’s reading of he poem in its historical context. For example, the introduction to “Elegiac Stanzas” (1805/07) begins, “Peele Castle stands on an island about a mile from the coast and can be seen from Rampside, where Wordsworth spent four weeks visiting a cousin in 1794. The poem describes two paintings of the castle, one that of Sir George Beaumont (ll. 43-52) and the other that which Wordsworth would have painted (ll. 13-28) before the loss of his dearly loved brother John, a ship’s captain, who was drowned at sea February 5, 1805.” Now, in that context, one more can more fully understand these oft-quoted lines:

So once it would have been — ’tis so no more;
I have submitted to a new control:
A power is gone, which nothing can restore;
A deep distress hath humanised my soul . . . .

Of course, the Wordsworth section includes various prefaces to the Lyrical Ballads, including the famous one of 1800; letters of Wordsworth and his family (including two with particular relevance to the “Elegiac Stanzas”); passages from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal, especially bearing on the origin of some of Wordsworth’s best known lyrics; harsh reviews by Francis Jeffrey, editor of The Edinburgh Review, not atypical of the reception of Romantic works during the time; and personal reminiscences of Wordsworth from three writers published in the 1880s.

Special features of Perkins’ anthology which would have been unusual, if not unique, in 1967 would have been the generous representation of William Blake’s works including his prophecy Milton in its entirety; almost a hundred pages of the critical essays of William Hazlitt and extended passages from his longer works; several poems by John Clare published after 1842 but associated with the Romantics; and all of Keats’ Hyperion, Lamia, and The Fall of Hyperion, as well as his lyrics and odes and some thirty pages of his letters (filled with astute critical speculation). There are also warm reminiscences of Keats by his teacher/friend Charles Cowden Clarke and his friend and housemate Benjamin Bailey, But also, to balance the picture and show the temper of the times, there is the negative criticism of his guardian Richard Woodhouse and the review “On the Cockney School of Poetry” by J. G. Lockhart published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1815.

Perkins’ General Introduction to the whole book is, likewise, a readable, yet scholarly, invitation to first-time readers and a critical preparation for what lies ahead. He begins by attempting the impossible: a definition of the term Romantic. Eventually, he hones in on the explanation of the Hegels—Friederich and August Wilhelm—for whom the “modern” or “romantic” is


“relatively indifferent to artistic form and seeks instead ‘fullness and life’—a complete expression of all life in its dymanism and its endless variety and particularity. . . . The “Romantic” refuses to recognize rstraints in subject matter or form and so is free to represent the abnormal, grotesque, and monstrous and to mingle standpoints, genres, modes of expression . . . , and even the separate arts in a single work. Ultimately it mirrors the struggle of genius aginst all limitation, and it leads to a glorification of yearning striving, and bcoming and of he pesonality of the artist as larger and more signficant than thenecessarily incomplete expression ot it in his work.”

Perkins proceeds, in his introduction, to deal with the historical background, the literary scene, the intellectual background (empricism, transcendalism, time and nostalgia, organicism, and the imagination), and the figure of the poet. In this last section, he comes round once again to defining, or characterizing, the Romantic: “The quest pursues an infinite, perhaps unknown ideal—complete being, final truth—and therefore the poet’s life is endless striving . . . . in a hopeless wish for the inaccessible . . . .”

Or as Wordsworth characterizes himself in The Prelude (XI.604 08):

Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expecation, and desire,
And someting evermore about to be.

With the insight of his madness, John Clare described himself as the Romantic poet:

I am a being created in the race
Of men, disdaining bounds of place and time;
A spirit that could travel o’er the space
Of earth and heaven like a thought sublime;
Tracing creation, like m Make free,
A soul unshackled like eternity . . . .

This was a generation of “souls unshackled.”

I still treasure my copy of Perkins, along with a shelf full of biographies, critical works, and collections of the works of individual poets. It still stands as a tribute to the ultimate romantic striving for infinitude, for something ever more about to me. Perkins acknowledges the advice he received from Northrup Frye, Earl Wasserman, Walter Jackson Bate, and Douglas Bush. As a young professor, those were the luminaries on my horizon. Perkins earned his place among them.

in 1815.

Perkins’ General Introduction to the whole book is, likewise, a readable, yet scholarly, invitation to first-time readers and a critical preparation for what lies ahead. He begins by attempting the impossible: a definition of the term Romantic. Eventually, he hones in on the explanation of the Hegels—Friederich and August Wilhelm—for whom the “modern” or “romantic” is


“relatively indifferent to artistic form and seeks instead ‘fullness and life’—a complete expression of all life in its dymanism and its endless variety and particularity. . . . The “Romantic” refuses to recognize rstraints in subject matter or form and so is free to represent the abnormal, grotesque, and monstrous and to mingle standpoints, genres, modes of expression . . . , and even the separate arts in a single work. Ultimately it mirrors the struggle of genius aginst all limitation, and it leads to a glorification of yearning striving, and bcoming and of he pesonality of the artist as larger and more signficant than thenecessarily incomplete expression ot it in his work.”

Perkins proceeds, in his introduction, to deal with the historical background, the literary scene, the intellectual background (empricism, transcendalism, time and nostalgia, organicism, and the imagination), and the figure of the poet. In this last section, he comes round once again to defining, or characterizing, the Romantic: “The quest pursues an infinite, perhaps unknown ideal—complete being, final truth—and therefore the poet’s life is endless striving . . . . in a hopeless wish for the inaccessible . . . .”

Or as Wordsworth characterizes himself in The Prelude (XI.604 08):

Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expecation, and desire,
And someting evermore about to be.

With the insight of his madness, John Clare described himself as the Romantic poet:

I am a being created in the race
Of men, disdaining bounds of place and time;
A spirit that could travel o’er the space
Of earth and heaven like a thought sublime;
Tracing creation, like m Make free,
A soul unshackled like eternity . . . .

This was a generation of “souls unshackled.”

I still treasure my copy of Perkins, along with a shelf full of biographies, critical works, and collections of the works of individual poets. It still stands as a tribute to the ultimate romantic striving for infinitude, for something ever more about to me. Perkins acknowledges the advice he received from Northrup Frye, Earl Wasserman, Walter Jackson Bate, and Douglas Bush. As a young professor, those were the luminaries on my horizon. Perkins earned his place among them. show less

As good as volume I, but not as interesting for the most part. That's probably just because I didn't know as much about the poetry covered in volume I, combined with the fact that most of the stuff covered in the last 180 pages of this one is guff. Perkins is rightly sceptical about much later twentieth century American poetry, and even when he praises he notes that there are huge problems - Ashbery, he admits, it boring; taking dictation from Ouija boards is, shall we say, not a great way show more to present yourself Mr Merrill.
The chapters on African-American, and feminist poetry are short and could probably be longer, the chapter on Nature Boy doggerel could certainly be shorter. The real downside to this volume is how little non-American post-war poetry is discussed- The UK as a whole gets 58 pages out of the 330 he sets aside for this period. Even from the evidence of this book, if you're going on quality that ratio should be reversed. A less even-handed author might cut the 330 back to 200 and give only 50 to America's innumerable, little, rebellious schools. On the other hand, chapter 16, on American poets who were formed by but rebelled against the New Criticism, gave me lots of names to hunt down.
Beautifully written, clear and concise despite its length. show less

Even-handed, informative, and just good writing. Would have been happier with fewer concessions to the farce of free verse and obscurity that is modernist poetry, but really it wasn't as bad as the complete surrender typical in literary criticism and history.