HEANEY, SEAMUS & HUGHES, TED – THE RATTLE BAG (1982) Faber & Faber).
Probably the best single volume poetry anthology collection available. Most of the giants are represented, Blake, Shakespeare, Yeats, Byron etc. Unlike most such best of the best compilations, the Rattle Bag is set out in alphabetical order by poem title rather than by author’s name or chronological sequencing. The result is an unpredictable swirling change of moods and styles that allows each poet to standout in its own glory and merit rather than as part of a set or context. Humorous, serious, dark and light, romantic and mournful. You never know what is coming next. Some poets get more entries than others. Blake gets about twenty poems included, while John Donne gets only one, and John Milton none at all. There are also some sterling examples of the poetry anthology compiler’s cardinal sin – using small extracts from a long work as self-contained poems. With Shakespeare, all of the included poetry is taken from his plays. There are none of his sonnets here at all. not even ‘Shall I Compare Thee’. What is included is of course high quality literature, It is possible to just open the book to a random page and just choose a poem for the hell of it, which explains the title of the book, though it is actually the title of a poem in the collection by Dafydd ap Quillym. This is a book of poetry for pleasure rather than for educational study. It’s good to see American poets like Walt Whitman & Hermann Melville rubbing shoulders with English, Welsh & Scottish giants too. If there is a bias, it is to 20th century poets, which is not surprising in that Heaney & Hughes are leading bards of the period themselves, though they both resist the temptation to add their own verse to the book too. A sheer joy to read.
© Copyright. Arthur Chappell
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