Thou, who behold’st my Muse’s rash design,
Teach me thy art of Poetry divine;
Or, since thy cares, alas! on me were vain,
Teach me that harder talent — to refrain.
They make a nice table-grace for minor poets of all ages.
There are other mystifying prose-poetry juxtapositions, too. The poems that Goldsmith inserted into The Vicar of Wake-field are in the English Poetry Database (“When lovely woman stoops to folly”), as is the “chair-lumbered closet” that Goldsmith mentions in his poem “The Haunch of Venison,” but not the poems Charles Dickens put in The Pickwick Papers (“Creeping on, where time has been,/A rare old plant is the Ivy green”13), or any of Dickens’s other poems or prologues:
Awake the Present! Shall no scene display
The tragic passion of the passing day?
Leigh Hunt’s poetry is here, but not one poem by Thackeray.14 There are eighty religious poems by a certain Francis William Newman, including the interestingly abysmal antipollution tract “Cleanliness” (1858), which staggers to its Whitman-esque peak with
The workers of wealthy mines poison glorious mountain torrents,
Drugging them with lead or copper to save themselves petty trouble;
And the peasant groans in secret or regards it as a “landed right,”
And after some lapse of time the law counts the right valid.
The work of this Newman is included because the New Cambridge Bibliography lists him as a minor poet of the period 1835–1870. Not a hemistich, however, by the man’s older brother, John Henry, Cardinal Newman, finds its way in, since the New Cambridge Bibliography categorizes Cardinal Newman as a mid-nineteenth-century prose writer. Yet Cardinal Newman’s poems are both better and better known (“Lead, kindly light”); two were chosen by Francis Turner Palgrave for his Golden Treasury, Second Series.15 Emily Brontë’s poetry was reached by Chadwyck-Healey’s rural electrification program, but Charlotte’s and Anne’s was not, despite the fact that all three women published a book together in 1846: Poems, by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. “It stole into life,” wrote Mrs. Gaskell of the book: “some weeks passed over without the mighty murmuring public discovering that three more voices were uttering their speech.” It got a decent review in the Atheneum, and while many will concede that Emily’s poetry shows the most talent, Charlotte’s is not embarrassing:
The room is quiet, thoughts alone
People its mute tranquillity;
The yoke put off, the long task done,—
I am, as it is bliss to be,
Still and untroubled.
(“The Teacher’s Monologue”)
Warm is the parlour atmosphere,
Serene the lamp’s soft light;
The vivid embers, red and clear,
Proclaim a frosty night.
Books, varied, on the table lie,
Three children o’er them bend,
And all, with curious, eager eye,
The turning leaf attend.
(“Gilbert”)
And if you search the English Poetry Database for the words join and choir and invisible together you will retrieve sixty-four nineteenth-century efforts by such fixtures of the poetasters’ pantheon as Atherstone, Bickersteth, Caswall, Coutts-Nevill, Mant, Smedley, and Mary Tighe (and Byron and Keats and Coleridge, too) — but you won’t pull up George Eliot’s
O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence
or any other poetry she wrote. (I found two instances of “rubbish-heap” in Eliot’s 488-page Collected Poems, edited by Lucien Jenkins, but discovered no lumber.)
Finally, if you want to read about “hope’s delusive mine” in Samuel Johnson’s verses on the death of Dr. Levet, your hopes will be dashed; in fact if you browse for any “S. Johnson” in the database’s name index you will browse in vain. (You will find “L. Johnson,” “R. Johnson,” and “W. Johnson,” though.) Still, the actual texts of Johnson’s two best poems, “London” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” are hidden within, retrievable not by poet’s name but by title or search-word, since they were republished in Dodsley’s Collection of 1763, one of the compendia that Chadwyck-Healey’s editors (rightly) shipped off to the Philippines for keypunching.16 Dodsley’s Collection fortunately also happens to contain one version of Richard Bentley’s only poem (he isn’t listed in the name index, either), a poem itemizing the tribulations of the scholar:
He lives inglorious, or in want,
To college and old books confin’d;
Instead of learn’d he’s call’d pedant,
Dunces advanc’d, he’s left behind.
Samuel Johnson could recite Bentley’s poem from memory, as H. W. Garrod reminds us in Scholarship: Its Meaning and Value, before he (Garrod, that is) goes on to praise A. E. Housman (a Bentley worshipper himself) as a “great scholar and, as I shall always think, a great poet,” which is a remarkably generous assessment, since Housman had, in a preface to his edition of Manilius,17 viciously dismissed Garrod’s earlier Manilian emendations as “singularly cheap and shallow” and judged Garrod’s apparatus criticus “often defective and sometimes visibly so.”
Housman would probably say similarly rude things about the holes, minor and major, in the English Poetry Database (no Jonathan Swift at all, anywhere?18) since Housman spent most of his life absorbed in “those minute and pedantic studies in which I am fitted to excel and which give me pleasure,” and was intolerant of grand schemes and mechanized shortcuts. Moreover, his own 1896 volume, A Shropshire Lad, is missing from the disks, possibly for copyright reasons, a fact that would have nettled him, although he would have pretended not to care.
But we, on the other hand, shouldn’t say rude things. This database may be, as John Sutherland pointed out in the London Review of Books (vol. 16, no. 11, 9 June 1994), the most significant development in literary scholarship since xerography. And even Sutherland’s high praise is insufficient. The EPFTD, as some refer to it, is a mind-manuring marvel, and we are lucky that a lot is left out (provided that no university libraries, tempted by its aura of comprehensiveness, “withdraw”—which is to say, get rid of — the unelectrified source books themselves); we don’t want every corner of poetry lit with the same even, bright light, for such a uniformity would interfere with what Housman himself called the “hide-and-seek” of learning. The god of scholars, Housman pointed out in his “Introductory Lecture,” “planted in us the desire to find out what is concealed, and stored the universe with hidden things that we might delight ourselves in discovering them.” And the fact is that Chadwyck-Healey’s demiurgic project comes so much closer than anything else in paper or plastic to the unattainable om of total inclusion (containing, by my estimate, several thousand times more poetry than Great Poetry Classics, itself a fine shovelware CD-ROM published by World Library, Inc.) that hunter-gatherers of all predilections can pretend, some of the time, when it calms their research anxieties to do so, that no obscurity of consequence will be left unfingered. After all, the disks hold (on top of hymns before 1800, and nursery rhymes) many verse translations from other languages into English, if they were published before 1800—a very useful subcategory for the lumber-struck.