I'm by no means an acolyte of poetry critic Helen Vendler; but when I noticed "Are These the Poems to Remember?"--her review in the NY Review of Books of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove--I thought I ought to read it. As you know, I'm in the midst of assembling my own poetry-themed anthology, so I've acquired a certain professional interest in how other editors make and defend their choices and how those choices and attitudes might influence a reader. One of the primary discoveries I've made as an anthologist is that, without purposefully narrowing one's scope to a specific time, place, or subgroup of writers, it's nigh on impossible to avoid creating a book full of canonical white male poets if one is honestly working to include the best, most influential writers. The reasons are clear: thousands of years of illiterate or undereducated women, oral as opposed to written traditions, a dearth of translations and transcriptions, not to mention a lack of leisure. Even if they were literate, slaves and serfs didn't have, to put it mildly, the liberty of unstructured time. Moreover, people haven't always had access to a variety of books. The canonical writers became our cultural foundation partly because their volumes were sitting on our bookshelves. If we wanted to better ourselves, whether we were Charlotte Bronte or Frederick Douglass, we took Shakespeare off the shelf.

According to Vendler, Dove's anthology attempts to "shift the balance." Of course she is working solely within the twentieth century, so she has more material at hand, yet Vendler still has reservations:

Multicultural inclusiveness prevails: some 175 poets are represented. No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading, so why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value? Anthologists may now be extending a too general welcome. Selectivity has been condemned as "elitism," and a hundred flowers are invited to bloom. People who wouldn't be able to take on the long-term commitment of writing a novel find a longed-for release in writing a poem. And it seems rude to denigrate the heartfelt lines of people moved to verse. It is popular to say (and it is in part true) that in literary matters tastes differ, and that every literary critic can be wrong. But there is a certain objectivity bestowed by the mere passage of time and its sifting of wheat from chaff: Which of Dove's 175 poets will have staying power, and which will seep back into the archives of sociology?

I think this is a fair question. And I also think that Vendler's later comment about education is worth considering:

One must, after all, face the fact that all poets who wield language powerfully are exquisitely well educated, even if they have had to educate themselves, as Whitman and Dickinson and Crane did. Just because one describes a "hardscrabble Appalachia" doesn't make one a hardscrabble Appalachian. . . .

Pegging poets to their origins doesn't change the fact that they leave those origins behind and live the "elite" life of the educated, even when, like Whitman, they live in poverty.

I have to go feed animals now, or else I'd talk more about Vendler's reactions to Dove's commentary on the history of twentieth-century poetry and what V sees as D's discomfort "in the essayist's role." But if you've read the review, I'd love to hear your comments. I'd also love to hear what you think about this education-elitism conundrum.