A recent review of Rita Dove's new anthology of 20th century American Poetry, for Penguin, by Helen Vendler, really takes exception to a multicultural Keith Tuma-style approach to the anthology. Vendler is clearly on the side of a canon of well-made poems, versus Dove's attention to identity poetry, and poetry of the often marginalised. Both sides can become entrenched. I welcome diversity, but Vendler, in this case, seems to have a firmer grasp of history and quality. Surely it must be wrong in a Kantian sense to include twice as much of Melvin B. Tolson as Wallace Stevens? Stevens is one of the pillars of American modernist and post-modernist poetics. Tolson is an important outrider of the Harlem Renaissance, and a key African-American modernist. If this decision gets more Tolson readers, that's fine. But such large-scale anthologies do also need to keep some sense of balance. I look forward to reading it myself.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/dec/22/defending-anthology/
Page counts do not just reflect importance, they also reflect the lengths at which the poet works best -- Tolson wrote longer poems and so it is not really that shocking that he takes up more room.
Stevens is so overrated these days that giving him less room is all to the good, though I would say teh same thing about teh writings of Rita Dove.