From Alan Richardson, Boston College
Let me pick up on an old thread [of discussion].
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich decided to go with both the Mellor-Matlak anthology (due out in a year or so?) and a revision of the Perkins (now available). Most likely they felt that there were two constituencies (and/or two kinds of courses) to serve, one more oriented toward poetry and the received canon, one ready to leave the association of British Romanticism and poetry in the dustbin of history and democratize the field in terms of genre as well as number and gender of writers represented. The Mellor-Matlak anthology, if it's going to stay close to the working table of contents distributed at the NASSR meeting at Duke, will indeed be a wonderful teaching resource and help us create quite new Romantics courses (or implement the ones we've already created without overtaxing the department xerox machine).
Someone on the list described the new Perkins as a "conservative" revision, which is true enough in that it conserves almost everything that was in the old one. (It also maintains the high production values of the old one and, as yet someone else mentions, adds those great full-page color plates from Blake's _Songs_). In its addition of women writers, though, I'm not sure it's *more* conservative than the Wu anthology, just more selective in terms of authors represented.
The Wu anthology gives us (these numbers are approximate, I haven't double-checked) 27 women poets but often only one or two poems by each: in all, 27 poets and 58 poems and two brief selections from longer poems. The new Perkins selects only 8 women poets, but reprints 46 of their poems and a long selection from Tighe's _Psyche_ (some 400 lines as opposed to 85 lines in Wu. The new Perkins also included (alas only) two longer poems, both very important: Barbauld's "1811" (335 lines) and Hemans's "A Spirit's Return" (262 lines)—there's nothing comparable in Wu. Similarly, in terms of women's prose, Wu includes 6 authors and about 20 pages of prose, whereas Perkins has five writers but about 55 pages. So in terms of lines and pages, Perkins gives *more* representation to women writers, just not to as many.
So if one's going to do an author-based syllabus (again, perhaps the conservative approach here) Perkins seems far more useful. One can do a class or two each on Barbauld, on Hemans, on D. Wordsworth, teach M. Shelley's "Transformation," build a class on the more generous selections from Mary Wollstonecraft (*why* didn't Perkins include Barbauld's "Rights of Woman"?), give a class on L.E.L., etc. The problem with the Wu approach (lots of authors, few poems by each) is that one is forced to make "garlands" of women poets to teach, as though the women aren't up to the sort of sustained attention Wu's anthology gives to the guys. So for my money, the Perkins is a better anthology—but then, it's not my money, it's my students', and there the lower price of the Wu makes me rethink.
In the meantime, as we're waiting for the Mellor-Matlak, does anyone know if the Ashfield _Women Romantic Poets_ anthology advertised last year and then retracted has since come out?(1) It would be nice to have something more substantial than Breen,(2) which follows the same principle as Wu with one or two exceptions (e.g. More's _Slavery_, which I miss in Perkins, especially since he's now included _Visions of the Daughters of Albion_: now there's a coupling made in hell).
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From David E. Latane, Virginia Commonwealth University
RE: New Perkins
I'd like to thank Alan Richardson for the detailed analysis of our sudden anthological riches. I was worried, in fact, that Perkins and the approach it represents would disappear—and perhaps a little miffed that after ten autumns with the length of—ten autumns, actually—that after ten autumns with the Perkins anthology the publisher didn't send me a new one. But I also have a bone to pick about the notion that we should be ready to "leave the association of British romanticism and poetry in the dustbin of history and democratize the field in terms of genre as well as number and gender." My reluctance to leave behind Romanticism and poetry (I teach women poets in the course, this Fall the Curran _Charlotte Smith_) has to do with two things: 1) students at my university have little opportunity to study poetry as such, and many graduate without a minimal ability to read it; 2) the "democratization" is in some ways a false consolation. I'll explain the latter. I once did a fairly reliable survey and concluded that the University of Virginia library had fewer than 2% of the books published in Britain in a single year (from the 1830s), and out of that, of course, 99% have never been taught or received scholarly attention. Thus the "democratic" expansion doesn't significantly increase democratic representation, only reshapes an oligarchy. Much significant writing is just as silently unrepresented on the new shop counter as in the old wares in the dustbin. So I'll probably stick to teaching the period's poetry, and choosing what I think, using fairly traditional criteria, are the best-made poems to teach. Otherwise, why be limited by the selections of Mellor or Wu? How much Malthus, Ricardo, Bentham, Mackenzie, Brougham, Price, Alison—to name just a few prosers off the top of my head—are we going to teach in a semester, and if none, why not? When we teach Baillie & not Brougham, we're making an undemocratic selection, it seems to me, based on criteria that are just as suspect as when we taught "Prometheus Unbound" rather than "A Spirit's Return" because it seems a better crafted, more complex poem by a more significant poet.
But for now, back to my exam (in "Form & Theory of Poetry").
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