T.S. Eliot: Poets and Anthologies

T.S. Eliot was born on this date (Sept. 26) in 1888. During his career, Eliot actively controlled the appearance of his poetry, always conscious of the value in strategically placing his works with certain journals and carefully manipulating their appearance in anthologies. Indeed, when Harriet Monroe, editor at Poetry, requested permission in 1916 to reprint in an anthology “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which had first appeared in the journal’s pages in 1915, Eliot declined her request. His poem would have been a most appropriate contribution to Monroe’s gathering of poems, The New Poetry: An Anthology, which she co-edited with Alice Corbin Henderson for publication in 1917. However, Eliot wrote a letter to Monroe on March 27, 1916, explaining his reluctance. He informed her that the poem already had appeared in an anthology published in London, and he stated: “I really feel that I should be making a mistake in reprinting it again in an anthology before it appears in a book.” Eliot’s initial book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917.

Following a further inquiry by Harriet Monroe, Eliot replied in a letter (dated June 7, 1916) that he still would not release “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” for her anthology: “As for ‘Prufrock’: you see, I shall probably have a small volume coming out just about the same time as your anthology, in the autumn, in New York. If it were much before or much after I should probably be quite glad to enter ‘Prufrock’ in both, but it seems to me that to synchronise would be inadvisable.” Eliot instead offered Monroe a different poem, “Portrait of a Lady,” as a substitute for her anthology, which she accepted.

On another occasion, when reading a review in The Times Literary Supplement, Eliot discovered poems of his had been included in an anthology (Modern American Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer) apparently without his permission. Eliot responded by sending a letter to the editor of the newspaper, and it appeared in the November 24, 1921 issue of The Times Literary Supplement, under the heading “Poets and Anthologies,” a year before the publication of The Waste Land. In his statement, Eliot declared the following, perhaps referring to Robert Graves as the poet “whose name is much more widely known”:

“I should like to remark that I should have much preferred not being included in this anthology. On previous occasions, when compilers of such works have asked my consent, there have always been personal reasons for my willing compliance: here there would have been none.

“Some months ago I discussed the general question of anthologies with a poet (of a different school and tradition from mine) whose name is much more widely known than mine is. We agreed that the work of any poet who has already published a book of verse is likely to be more damaged than aided by anthologies. I hope that other writers may be encouraged to express their opinions.”

Eliot’s comments concerning his views on anthologies seem even more interesting today as his poems are continually introduced to readers—especially on class reading lists, semester after semester, distributed to students like those in my Twentieth Century Poetry course—through their inclusion in massive anthologies. Certainly, any author would prefer his or her work to be encountered within the original framework of the poet’s own volume, individually designed as a primary source, rather than possibly diluted by its presence among a thousand pages packed with the distractions of poems by more than one hundred fellow poets.

Nevertheless, the anthology allows readers to easily and more economically become familiar with an abundance of poets, and its benefits include the opportunity for readers to determine a poet’s place, chronologically and contextually, among others who might be regarded as contemporaries or peers. Ideally, the poetry anthology serves as a perfect sampler from which readers select an array of contributors for further investigation in the poets’ individual collections of work.

Furthermore, one wonders how the issue of exposure through anthology publication has been altered nowadays by the widespread availability of poems online at websites like the Academy of American Poets or, ironically, the Poetry Foundation (publisher of Poetry magazine), which includes “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” among its roster of T.S. Eliot’s poems.