OF THE MAKING of literary anthologies, there is no end--and no visible end, as well, to the routine disappearance of such volumes. The critical intelligence required to compile meaningful selections is rarer than is commonly thought, though it need not be. Back in 1929, exactly seventy-five years ago, a pair appeared--V.F. Calverton's Anthology of American Negro Literature and Marcus Graham's An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry--that are worth remembering today, for they remind us what it is that literary anthologies at their best can do.
Calverton's Anthology of American Negro Literature had a certain prominence in its time, not because it was the first attempt to be comprehensive about its subject, but also because it appeared early in the Modern Library, which educated American readers well into the 1960s. Calverton himself was a well-known writer in the 1930s, and he edited two other popular Modern Library anthologies, The Making of Man: An Outline of Anthropology (1931) and The Making of Society: An Outline of Sociology (1937). Born George Goetz, he lived mostly in Baltimore and died at age forty in 1940.
Calverton organized his anthology by literary genres, beginning with fiction. The book opens with the short story "Fern" by Jean Toomer, a masterpiece by a writer forgotten for many years, in part because he was a sophisticated modernist, but also because he scarcely published in the later decades of his life. Later sections include the eighteenth-century Phillis Wheatley, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Countée Cullen, and Langston Hughes, who was then only in his twenties. Then Calverton makes a radical editorial move that was surprising in 1929, reprinting five examples apiece of spirituals, blues, and labor songs, which is to say anonymous African-American art.
THE BOOK'S FINAL SECTION has four kinds of essays: literary, historical, sociological, and autobiographical. In the third, Calverton's selection is particularly strong, including the proto-conservative George S. Schuyler along with the publicist Walter White and the critical polemicist E. Franklin Frazier. Only in the autobiography section does Calverton make an embarrassing mistake, reprinting from Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, which was obviously fiction, albeit with a persuasive first-person narrator. Contemporary academics might wonder about the comparative slighting of W.E.B. Du Bois, who is represented only with a chapter from his second novel and one historical essay, implicitly neglecting his mercurial polemics. But since these weren't meant to last, that slight seems correct to me. Seventy-five years later, Calverton's sense of Negro American Literature still looks smart.
The other book worth remembering, An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry was self-published and self-designed, clearly as a labor of love, by a writer who worked in printing named Shmuel Marcus, though he called himself Marcus Graham. (During the 1930s he would, under his pseudonym, edit an anarchist periodical entitled Man!) The book is printed on fine paper, with many words and borders in red--which, since the typeface is letterpress, means these pages passed through a printer twice.
Revolutionary Poetry opens with an elegantly written preface thanking all who made the anthology possible, beginning with a list of those who offered "moral support" (Witter Bynner, C. Erskine Scott Wood, Clement Wood, Countée Cullen, Joseph Freeman), benefactors (William Rose Benét and the playwright Percy MacKay, among others), proofreaders, and publishers--and ending with "the ideal that has aided me to gain whatever understanding of life my mind now embraces. This ideal, most misunderstood and misrepresented, most distorted and maligned of all the ideals laid bare before humanity."
That ideal, it turns out, is anarchism. "It is to this Ideal that I dedicate An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry," Graham writes, and he was no Communist or orthodox lefty. Most of the book divides into two sections: "The Forerunners" and "The Moderns." In the first section are over one hundred contributors, including such familiar names as William Blake, William Cullen Bryant, William Lloyd Garrison, Oliver Goldsmith, Robert Herrick, Joyce Kilmer, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell--together with Shakespeare, Shelley, Poe, Swinburne, Tennyson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Wilde. The selections reiterate two themes: the exposure of social inequities and the recurring human desire for freedom. The selection from Bryant, for instance, excerpts from his "The Antiquity of Freedom," and Graham's inclusion of dozens of unfamiliar poets in the "Forerunners" section reflects the editor's wide reading.
With "The Moderns," his choice is once again eclectic, including many unfamiliar names along with Richard Aldington, Maxwell Anderson, Hilaire Belloc, Bliss Carmen, G.K. Chesterton, Padraic Collum, Theodore Dreiser, Max Eastman, Robert Frost, Louis Ginsberg (Allen Ginsberg's father), Robert Graves, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Vachel Lindsay, Edwin Markham, John Masefield, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg (whose poem "I Am the People, the Mob" also opens the book), Louis Untermeyer, and George Sylvester Viereck (who a decade later became Adolf Hitler's American publicist).
ENGLISH-LANGUAGE POETS not sufficient to establish the original synthesis of the book, Graham then reprints anonymous poems and highly selective translations from sixteen other languages. Even today, if the Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry appeared (and it should be reprinted), we would credit Graham with a surprising synthesis, implicitly demonstrating that it is possible for a serious independent editor to produce an anthology that looks strong a full seventy-five years later. Calverton and Graham both put together books that were necessary anthologies, rather than opportunistic. There's their lesson.
Richard Kostelanetz is a poet in New York City.