Introduction


Farrar and Straus, the last of the small independent houses of its kind, was founded by Roger Straus and John Farrar in 1946. They bumped along, publishing whatever they could get their hands on with the collaboration of a number of other partners, until 1955, when Robert Giroux joined the firm, which was known by then as Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. Giroux had had a distinguished career as a literary editor at Harcourt, Brace and Company, one of the leading publishers of the prewar era, but he’d fallen out with new management and suddenly found himself “on the beach,” as his new boss, who had known Bob in the navy during the war, liked to put it. Roger soon made Bob his editor in chief, and a string of leading writers—among them John Berryman, Jack Kerouac, Robert Lowell, Flannery O’Connor, and Jean Stafford—eventually followed him, resetting the tone and direction of the list once and for all. Bob’s arrival was, as Roger noted, “the single most important thing to happen to this company.” In 1964 it became Farrar, Straus and Giroux in recognition of his decisive contribution.1

As the list above indicates, several of Giroux’s signal writers were poets, and from the moment he arrived poetry assumed a place at the heart of the company’s identity. Berryman, his closest friend at Columbia College, was a lifelong comrade, and his groundbreaking poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet became the first book Giroux published at his new home, in 1956. Homage laid the foundation for a generation of FSG poets, which would include not only Lowell and his friend Elizabeth Bishop but also Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, and Louise Bogan.2 The house also published a number of prominent poets in translation—Juan Ramón Jiménez, Pablo Neruda, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Nelly Sachs, all recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature—and this internationalist leaning was likewise a sign of things to come.

Another relationship that would have major consequences for FSG was Giroux’s friendship with T. S. Eliot, not only the most renowned poet of the century (he too had received the Nobel Prize, in 1948) but also the motivating editorial spirit at Faber and Faber, the London publisher he had helped build into one of the English-speaking world’s most influential. Thanks to Eliot, the Faber list, which featured not only Eliot himself but also Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and W. H. Auden, had unquestioned poetic primacy in Britain.3 The partnership forged by Giroux and Eliot, who also published his last books at Giroux’s new house, continued to thrive under Charles Monteith, Eliot’s successor as Faber’s literary editor, who brought on Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes—all eventually also published by FSG. This cross-fertilization proved especially fruitful, since a number of later Faber poets, from Heaney to Michael Hofmann, were strongly affected by Lowell, while others, including Derek Walcott, joined Faber via FSG. Though the two houses have very different lists and identities, they share the conviction that poetry is fundamental to literary expression, that it is here the writer strikes their distinctive note most powerfully.

To mark FSG’s seventy-fifth anniversary, we have assembled an anthology— in all honesty, never one of Roger’s favorite kinds of books—in honor of Bob Giroux’s signal contribution to our DNA, and to underline poetry’s continued centrality to the house. It includes work by nearly all the poets published here since Bob’s arrival, presented in broadly chronological sections. This affords some sense of how the company’s editorial perspectives have evolved over the decades, and how the scope of FSG’s poetry has gradually expanded from Giroux’s classic core in widening, more or less concentric circles. The poems are designated by the date of their first publication on the FSG list, which occasionally makes for unexpected juxtapositions. Certain poets one might have expected to find among the house’s early offerings have only recently arrived: Marianne Moore, for instance, finally showed up in 2017, in Heather Cass White’s new edition. Echoes of the incisive intricacies of Moore’s verse, though, can be heard in the work of younger poets as different as Maureen N. McLane, Ange Mlinko, and Carl Phillips.

FSG poetry has never been a school so much as a congeries of individual sensibilities; still, in the modernist schism marked by the Eliot-Pound divergence, the house fell squarely on Eliot’s side of the line, while James Laughlin at New Directions championed the objectivists and their heirs, the Black Mountain poets. FSG mainly eschewed the Beats, despite Giroux’s friendship with Jack Kerouac, and much of the New York School—a missed opportunity. Nevertheless, during the seventies, eighties, and nineties, we welcomed poets as diverse as James Wright and James Schuyler, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Joseph Brodsky, Frederick Seidel, John Ashbery, Frank Bidart, Adam Zagajewski, and Les Murray. They joined a list of equally distinct prose writers who were helping to shape American letters, among them Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, John McPhee, Jamaica Kincaid, Lydia Davis, Tom Wolfe, and many, many others.

The poetry of the last two decades has embraced the multifariousness of the culture and the competing (if often complementary) interests of innovation and tradition. One satisfaction in selecting and arranging this anthology has been to see how contemporary poets have harmonized, wittingly or not, with their precursors, creating a sort of living choir, however diffused across space and time. In some poems, such as Christopher Logue’s cinematic rewriting of Homer, the juxtaposition of old and new is the whole point, while Louise Glück’s reinhabiting of classical myth makes it urgently our own. But we hadn’t anticipated the echoes, for example, between Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s evocation of the looting of German cities at the close of World War II (in his long poem “Prussian Nights”), Durs Grünbein’s “Lament of a Legionnaire,” on Roman campaigns in Germania, and Mahmoud Darwish’s elegy for the Moorish cities of Andalusia after the Reconquista (“On the Last Evening on this Earth”). We hope that some of the pleasure we had in discovering these unexpected harmonies will resonate in the reader as well.

The book closes with the poets of the 2020s, recently or soon to be published, and features work by writers from Belarus, Egypt, Jamaica, and elsewhere. There are new recuperations too, including Lowell’s old friend and sparring partner Delmore Schwartz (also the subject of a moving Berryman elegy, included here), and the founder of modern poetry himself, Charles Baudelaire.

We have aimed to single out poems that come alive as objects on their own, even as they rhyme—often at a slant—with other pieces in the anthology. There are greatest hits here, but more frequently we’ve tried to select work that is perhaps less familiar yet nevertheless characteristic of the writer: renewed discoveries to hold up to the light again.

Above all, we hope this book is fun—full of surprises and delights that will lead the reader back to the wealth of extraordinary voices who have helped make FSG the house it is.

ROBYN CRESWELL AND JONATHAN GALASSI


BEGINNINGS1950s–1970s


JOHN BERRYMAN

Dream Song #22


Of 1826

I am the little man who smokes & smokes.

I am the girl who does know better but.

I am the king of the pool.

I am so wise I had my mouth sewn shut.

I am a government official & a goddamned fool.

I am a lady who takes jokes.

I am the enemy of the mind.

I am the auto salesman and lóve you.

I am a teenage cancer, with a plan.

I am the blackt-out man.

I am the woman powerful as a zoo.

I am two eyes screwed to my set, whose blind—

It is the Fourth of July.

Collect: while the dying man,

forgone by you creator, who forgives,

is gasping “Thomas Jefferson still lives”

in vain, in vain, in vain.

I am Henry Pussy-cat! My whiskers fly.

1964


Copyright © 2021 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux