Writing Life: Remaking a Norton Anthology
Jahan Ramazani
Sharing a suffix with such academically serious words such as philology, anthropology, and oncology, the word anthology sounds respectable enough. But anthos, I belatedly discovered, is Greek for flower, and logia means collecting. So that's it?—devoting the last few years to editing the third edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, I've been engaged in the academic equivalent of flower-picking? Did I trade in my scholarly aspirations and become an effete arranger of bouquets? What redeems literary anthologists, if we're able to claim neither the creativity of the poet nor the analytic rigor of the cultural theorist? Having dedicated myself for years to constructing elaborate critical arguments, how did I get involved in what one of my friends called "pretheoretical" judgments about poem-gathering, a suspiciously curatorial practice in our supposedly post-canonical era?
The story of this unexpected turn in my career goes back to 1981, when I landed in England on the QE2, hoping to study with the famed American scholar Richard Ellmann, biographer of W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, author of numerous critical studies of modern literature, and then master of perhaps the most elegant and quietly witty prose style in criticism. He was also the coeditor, with Robert O'Clair, of an anthology of twentieth-century poetry in English—about which, more later. But frankly, once I moved into New College, a sherry glass's throw away from Ellmann's "rooms," he and my other Oxford dons—biographers and paleographers, historians and letter-editors—initially struck me as rather old-fashioned. Fresh out of college, I was fired up to read literature through the supernova-bright lenses of high theory. Hadn't they heard? Old historical, New Critical, and biographical approaches to literature were old hat: out with earth-bound Antaeus; in with the air-borne gyrations of the signifier! With the support of the odd-man-out at Oxford, the theorist Terry Eagleton, I led a series of seminars on Marxist, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, deconstructive, and other vanguard approaches. I was fulfilling the declaration I'd made when asked at my final Rhodes Scholarship interview how I'd "fight the world's fight," in accordance with Cecil Rhodes's will. In a response I now remember with embarrassment, I said I wanted to fight the dominance of the New Criticism and other outdated methods. (Somehow I don't think that was the answer that won me the scholarship.) Still, whatever my differences with Ellmann, seen by some as the best literary biographer of the century, I worked closely with him and was gradually won over by his humane intelligence, his ability to twin terse insight with large-hearted responsiveness, lucidity of expression with complexity of thought. Even today, he's strangely mixed up in my mind with Joyce's amiable and multifaceted Leopold Bloom, whom I first encountered under Ellmann's tutelage. Without quite realizing I was repeating Ellmann's example from forty years earlier, I, too, ended up writing a Yale dissertation on Yeats that became my first book, and from New Haven I corresponded with Ellmann about it until he died—much too soon—from the ravages of Lou Gehrig's disease, in 1987.
The story of this unexpected turn in my career goes back to 1981, when I landed in England on the QE2, hoping to study with the famed American scholar Richard Ellmann, biographer of W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, author of numerous critical studies of modern literature, and then master of perhaps the most elegant and quietly witty prose style in criticism. He was also the coeditor, with Robert O'Clair, of an anthology of twentieth-century poetry in English—about which, more later. But frankly, once I moved into New College, a sherry glass's throw away from Ellmann's "rooms," he and my other Oxford dons—biographers and paleographers, historians and letter-editors—initially struck me as rather old-fashioned. Fresh out of college, I was fired up to read literature through the supernova-bright lenses of high theory. Hadn't they heard? Old historical, New Critical, and biographical approaches to literature were old hat: out with earth-bound Antaeus; in with the air-borne gyrations of the signifier! With the support of the odd-man-out at Oxford, the theorist Terry Eagleton, I led a series of seminars on Marxist, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, deconstructive, and other vanguard approaches. I was fulfilling the declaration I'd made when asked at my final Rhodes Scholarship interview how I'd "fight the world's fight," in accordance with Cecil Rhodes's will. In a response I now remember with embarrassment, I said I wanted to fight the dominance of the New Criticism and other outdated methods. (Somehow I don't think that was the answer that won me the scholarship.) Still, whatever my differences with Ellmann, seen by some as the best literary biographer of the century, I worked closely with him and was gradually won over by his humane intelligence, his ability to twin terse insight with large-hearted responsiveness, lucidity of expression with complexity of thought. Even today, he's strangely mixed up in my mind with Joyce's amiable and multifaceted Leopold Bloom, whom I first encountered under Ellmann's tutelage. Without quite realizing I was repeating Ellmann's example from forty years earlier, I, too, ended up writing a Yale dissertation on Yeats that became my first book, and from New Haven I corresponded with Ellmann about it until he died—much too soon—from the ravages of Lou Gehrig's disease, in 1987.
