2 - Priming the Poets: The Making of Henry Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader

Summary

Introduction

Authors of textbooks can be remarkably influential: consciously and intentionally they popularize new ideas and set the tone for future scholarship, while subconsciously their writings embody the culture and ideas of a whole period. Such is the case with the Victorian scholar Henry Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader, from its modest beginnings in 1876, through its division into two books with the publication of An Anglo-Saxon Primer in 1882 and the elaborated fourth edition of An Anglo-Saxon Reader in 1884, forward to a definitive form in the seventh edition of 1894, thence onward to its twentieth-century afterlife and final paperback edition in 1967. The influence of the Anglo-Saxon Reader on twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon studies was considerable, and Sweet's choice of set texts became the accepted canon, part of our common knowledge of Old English literary culture. Modern poets such as Pound, Auden, Hill and Heaney all used this textbook, and all to varying degrees absorbed its late nineteenth-century ethos.

Ezra Pound's ‘The Seafarer’, for example, a translation of The Seafarer, was at one time dismissed by scholars such as Kenneth Sisam and Donald Davie as an over-literal crib by a poet ignorant of Old English. But the consensus changed with the discovery and study of Pound's personal annotated copy of the 1894 edition of the Reader in the Pound archives at Texas. As the researches of Fred C. Robinson, Michael Alexander and Chris Jones have since shown, Pound was well versed in Old English and his poem ‘The Seafarer’ was intended to convey the rhythm and texture of the original verse rather than the literal sense of the Old English words (I will return to Pound's ‘The Seafarer’ later in this chapter). Jones argues that Pound took his Anglo-Saxonism further, using Old English metrical rhythms and diction in The Cantos to explore the primitive otherness of the English past and to revitalize his own Imagist poetics. From Sweet's Reader, Pound learned about the nature of Old English metre and its relation to what Sweet characteristically called the ‘natural stress of the spoken language’. Each verse had its particular rhythm which Sweet described (appropriately for Pound) as ‘consisting of two waves — which need not be of equal length or even weight — each wave containing a lift, either by itself, or preceded or followed by a dip’ according to the then newly discovered Sievers types.