How To Pick A Flower

Anthology comes from the Greek, meaning - rather quaintly - `a collection of flowers`, which is still how Samuel Johnson defined it in his Dictionary of 1755. The first poetic bouquet, the Anthologia Graeca, was put together in 100 BC by Meleager of Gadara and comprised a variety of mainly erotic epigrams by some fifty poets: a bunch of small, attractive, often prickly things.

Almost two millennia later, in 1847, The Religious Tract Society published an anthology called A Garland of Poems for the Young. The majority of these poems, in their prim way, were not dissimilar from the Greeks - most were short and flowery - and included favourites like Edmund Waller`s `Go, Lovely Rose` and William Cowper`s `The Dog and the Water-Lily` set alongside more recent verses gleaned from magazines along the lines of English Flora: poems chosen for their florid, decorative and occasionally consolatory manner.

Among other similarly named Garlands, the Tract Society`s was indicative of the Victorian era`s new and rapidly growing appetite for the anthology, usually picked from the cream of the previous year`s crop of journals or assembled with a particular audience in mind. This culminated, in 1861, with Francis Palgrave`s blockbuster, The Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics. By 1891, when the second edition went to press, its publishers had already gone through over 100,000 printings.

Anthologies normally take either a passive or an active tack, seeking to reflect a popular consensus or to shape one. In both respects, Palgrave was a genius. He managed to combine the two functions so smoothly as to forge and muster a literary canon that felt as though it had always been there - with him only having to draw back the curtain - to the extent that we still unthinkingly adhere to it today.

Palgrave made sure that lyric poetry was established as the orthodoxy and the genealogy of its ascent laid out in full: Book I had the Elizabethans and Shakespeare; Book II Milton`s genius and the emergence of Dryden`s more modern style; Book III the relatively fallow 18th Century; and Book IV the creative high-point of the early 19th Century, where all previous strands - skill in language, metre, narrative and nature-writing - suddenly met in the brilliant generation of `Scott, Wordsworth, Campbell, Keats and Shelley`.

(Walter) Scott is now better known as a novelist and (Thomas) Campbell barely read at all, but the Golden Treasury served to assure the legacy of the Romantic poets, even against the later snipes of the Classically-minded T.S. Eliot.

Spanning five volumes between 1912 and 1922, the last truly popular anthology was Georgian Poetry, which sold an astonishing 70,000 copies. Its huge popularity was what led, in part, to the formation of a new kind of harder-edged, manifesto-driven anthology: Ezra Pound`s Des Imagistes (1914).

In August 1919, Harriet Monroe, editor of the Chicago-based magazine Poetry, commented that `There must be a large public for poetry, or the crop of anthologies would not outrun, as it does, the capacity of this magazine`, before turning derisively to two collections that had recently arrived on her desk, one of dog poems - `from Byron and Scott to W.M. Letts` - and the other `poems of filial or maternal devotion` called To Mother.

The public for poetry continues to dwindle and the crop of anthologies only grows, but at least, since Georgian Poetry and Des Imagistes, there has been a discernible forking of the roads, with most anthologies now making clear from the outset - however futile it may be - what exactly their aims are: populist or revolutionary.