Here in Washington, D.C., in the lobby of the main branch of the public library, is a carrel that serves as a way station for the city’s rejected books, those discarded tomes the library has chosen to remove from circulation and, in an effort to dispose of them, made available for sale to the public. It is a curious compendium, this urban literary graveyard. Many of the books are old how-to manuals for long-outdated computers or travel guides that promise reviews of the best restaurants in Istanbul-Istanbul in 1980, that is. There are extra copies of old bodice-ripper novels, and textbooks grimly dog-eared and underlined by some long-ago literary vandal cramming for a test. But recently I stumbled across a book whose retirement from the library’s collection marks an unfortunate trend. There on the shelf, in excellent condition and selling for a dollar, was The Boy’s Book of Verse, an anthology compiled by Helen Dean Fish. The volume, published in 1951 by J. B. Lippincott Co., was in its ninth printing.
Fish wrote and edited many popular children’s books in her day. In 1938, she shared with illustrator Dorothy Lathrop the honor of winning the first Randolph Caldecott Medal-the prestigious award for outstanding children’s books-for Animals of the Bible, a lavishly illustrated volume of selections from the Old and New Testament that traced the four-legged fortunes of the animal couples on Noah’s ark, the lions Daniel warily encountered in their den, and the whale that served as God’s temporary time-out space for the stubborn Jonah. Fish also introduced Americans to the German children’s story, "When the Root Children Wake Up," the bewitching tale of some youngsters who live, like potatoes, beneath the earth all winter until awakened by spring’s warm attentions to the amusements of life above ground.
Fish pitched The Boy’s Book of Verse to a slightly older audience, and, as she noted in her preface, simply hoped that the collection would introduce boys to the pleasures of poetry. It probably did, as her choice of poems includes some of the most engaging works ever written. Beginning with two selections from Rudyard Kipling and moving quickly to classics such as Robert Browning’s "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," Thomas Babington Macaulay’s "Horatius at the Bridge," Walter Scott’s "Lochinvar," Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s "Kubla Khan," and Edgar Allen Poe’s "Annabel Lee," the anthology is a ripping read. Lest one accuse Fish of ignoring the poetesses, she included works by Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Fish’s fine collection of verse explored themes of courage, daring, and honor as well as tragedy, death, war, and responsibility. Never the censorious editor, Fish even included poems that did not appeal to her own sensibilities; she admitted that she "put in one poem which seemed to me cruel, because I found that boys understand it and like it."
Fish offered gentle commentary alongside the poems. Of Kipling’s "If," she noted, "This poem, written in 1910, remains a steady favorite with men. ‘If’ came out on top recently in a popular vote at Yale University." She mentioned biographical details about the poets sparingly, and then only to remind her readers of the values of fortitude and moral courage, not to indulge in gossipy personal detail. "When he was a boy of twelve [he] became a cripple," she wrote matter-of-factly of poet William Ernest Henley. "But he fought his disadvantage bravely all his life, with his head ‘unbowed.’" Her reference was to Henley’s poem, "Invictus," which includes the lines, "In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance, My head is bloody, but unbowed."
As this example suggests, Fish did not shrink from difficult subjects. On the contrary, she appears to have selected certain poems specifically because they forced her young readers to confront the world’s harsh realities directly. The horror of war, for example, is ably examined in Alan Seeger’s "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" and John McCrae’s "In Flanders Fields," as well as in John Gillespie Magee’s "High Flight," which begins with the provocative line, "Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth." Magee did indeed slip the bonds of earth; as a nineteen-year-old pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1941, he died in combat. Seeger and McCrae also died in battle, during World War I, both before reaching the age of thirty.
What a toll the passage of time takes! A quick check on Amazon.com reveals that Fish’s anthology is now out of print. Today, a search for boy’s poetry calls up titles such as You Hear Me: Poems and Writings by Teenage Boys, described by Booklist as a collection of works devoted to "issues of identity" and "often frankly described sexuality." Library shelves now overflow with collections such as Ferocious Girls, Steamroller Boys, and Other Poems in Between, for budding bards between the ages of four and eight. The offerings in these volumes are amusing, but they do not begin to compare to William Blake or A. E. Housman in terms of literary merit, nor do they even come close to exploring the human condition in the way Fish’s selection of classic poems did. In Fish’s time, sixth-grade tyros struggling to tame The Book of Urizen or A Shropshire Lad might have longed for a confection like Steamroller Boys, but they were fortunate to have been forced to master iambic pentameter and heroic couplets instead.
Why are "boys’ books" like Helen Fish’s no longer in print? One explanation is the considerable change in cultural tone we have experienced in recent decades. Many teachers today tut-tut Kipling as an imperialist, racist hegemon. Untutored knaves in the 1950s might have thrilled to the idea of conquering continents, such teachers aver, but today we are too sophisticated to suggest such a thing to our students-young people who, in all likelihood, are incapable of identifying the countries of Africa or Asia on a map. There is also, of course, the fact of women’s altered status. Schools now focus on empowering girls, a not entirely unwarranted effort. In such a climate, books of verse for boys are not likely to be required reading. One could even argue that Fish’s now-remaindered anthology is like the Jurassic Park mosquito trapped in amber-a creature intractably embedded in its own time. There was something about the cultural mood of the 1950s that found wisdom and fortitude in the restraint of many of the Victorian poets with which Fish filled her pages; the Beat writers were then only beginning to test the limits of that culture.
Today, of course, people celebrate the shedding of such conventions and congratulate themselves on serving up classic poems with healthy helpings of ironical, deflating knowledge about their authors. Ultimately, however, there is something horribly platitudinous about promoting poetry that appeals to the adolescently banal instead of the deeply human. In the foreword to her book, Helen Fish wrote to her young male charges, "As you grow, in experience of life and acquaintance with poetry, you will easily sort out the greater from the lesser of these." Unfortunately for today’s students, the dearth of books like Fish’s suggests that today’s young people have a less lively and inspiring bit of sorting to do.
The author is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and a contributor to American Outlook.
