Wonderful!  Thank you.  I imagine the collection's publication was
courageous in 1940...how difficult such a thing would be to pull off
nowadays is beyond me.

Patrick

-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of maria fletcher
Sent: Monday, May 06, 2002 2:35 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Authors and titles


Patrick wrote:

"I'd be better served by a piece of artwork or a list of titles than a
list of authors."

One of my favorite collections of poetry was produced, in 1940, purely
to capture a poetic consciousness and response to an age - it has no
authors names, nor does it have a list of titles or index.

It is called "Fear No More - A book of poems for the present time by
living English poets" published by Cambridge University Press in 1940.
Dedicated to the Poet Laureate, June 1940 (which I think at the time was
John Masefield) it has a fascinating preface of which this is only a
short extract:

"TO the Reader...to print extracts without names so as to keep the mind
of the reader single, has been tried before; but, when a list of authors
was included at the end, curiosity more than defeated the compiler's
object.  No list of authors interrupts the reading of this book.  This
could not have been achieved without consent.  Every one of the
contributors has welcomed the request.  The book is therefore
unanimously anonymous, and its namelessness is a token of generous good
will.  But it will be found to be a gain to the book.  No poet achieves
perfection, though all intensely seek it.  Anonymity underlines the
common wealth of poetry; it also makes it less difficult for all good
poems to be read, as they need to be, with equal expectation.

The reader who asks "Who wrote this or that?" will be able to answer "A
poet now alive."  That answer has the better ring today, it has heart
and hope in it, it brings us all nobly together.  Here, then, is a book
of evidence that poetry and good will go together, and that even in our
time with its temptations to despair, both are practised still, not for
gain. But for liking."

One of the authorless poems in the book is called The Double Shame - and
I have to admit, I'm curious as to who the author might be!

The Double Shame
(anonymous -  1940ish)

You must live through the time when everything hurts
When the space of the ripe, loaded afternoon
Expands to a landscape of white heat frozen
And trees are weighed down with hearts of stone
And green stares back where you stare alone
And the walking eyes throw flinty comments
And the words which carry most knives are the blind
Phrases searching to be kind.
Solid and usual objects are ghosts
The furniture carries great cargoes of memory
The staircase has corners which remember
As fire blows most red in gusty embers
And each empty dress cuts out an image
In fur and evening and summer and gold
Of her who was different in each.
Pull down the blind and lie on the bed
And clasp the hour in the glass of one room
Against your mouth like a crystal of doom
Take up the book and look at the letters
Hieroglyphs on sand and as meaningless-
Here birds crossed once and cries were uttered
In a mist where sight and sound are blurred
For the story of those who made mistakes
Of one whose happiness pierced like a star
Eludes and evades between sentences
And the letters break into eyes which read
What the blood is now writing in your head
As though the characters sought for some clue
To their being so perfectly living and the dead
In your story, worse than theirs, but true.
Set in the mind of their poet, they compare
Their tragic bliss with your trivial despair
And they have fingers which accuse
You of the double way of shame:-
At first you did not love enough
And afterwards you loved too much
And you lacked the confidence to choose
And you have only yourself to blame.

Maria