In every language and at all periods, loose poems or fragments of poems are found that cannot be formally classified among the collected works of any known author, or bound up with other anonymous material forming an historical unit for which a legendary author has been invented; or yet, because of their character and number, be given each the distinction of separate publication. Popular ballads, unless forming part of a single cycle, epigrams, epitaphs, squibs, stray lyrics and even longer poems that have irretrievably lost author and date, may be fittingly united in a volume of non-classifiable verse; and this is always a legitimate use of the anthology. The anthology of the days before cheap books were printed was justified as a secure portfolio for short poems that might otherwise have been lost: short poems in confederacy being as safe from loss as a drama or epic equalling their combined length. When at the beginning of the first century before Christ Meleager compiled his Crown of epigrammatic 12verse as a gift for one Diocles, ‘weaving in the lilies of Anyte, the scarlet gopher of Antipater, the narcissus of Melanippides, the aromatic rush of Perseus, the young vine-branch of Simonides,’ and so on, he was doing a service both to Diocles and to the poems, which were fugitive pieces not obtainable at every public library or copying-school. Further, this compilation was made without prejudice to the longer poems by the authors represented in the anthology, or by other authors, which Diocles might obtain in manuscripts of formal length. Meleager added epigrams of his own to the Crown, but none written by any contemporary except those of his famous neighbour Antipater, and these probably for friendship’s sake only; the poems of other contemporaries were left to their own fate. The Crown was an anthology in the sense that A. H. Bullen’s Lyrics from the Elizabethan Song Books is an anthology: it was a collection of flowers, but from remote or not readily accessible gardens. But Meleager was a poet exercising an independent personal taste, Bullen a literary connoisseur. Although Diocles was informed at the end of the ‘proem’ that the garland was not merely a personal gift to him but a common gift to all lovers of poetry, this was rather a rhetorical flourish than an acknowledgment of responsibility to a poetry-consuming public, such as Bullen must have felt. Diocles circulated the manuscript: it was copied and much admired.

 

A Pamphlet
AGAINST ANTHOLOGIES

by
LAURA RIDING
AND ROBERT GRAVES - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/79781/pg79781-images.html