Foreword to Selected Poems of George Herbert Clarke

For at least three years before his death, George Herbert Clarke had been working at a final selection of his poems.  The table in his sitting-room was heaped to a precarious height with papers, books, correspondence, and periodicals: that’s the way he liked it.  There was, he said, a precise though recondite system to that cumulus – and he must have known, because he worked at that table.  In the autumn of 1950, after an absence of two years, I called on him in his new house and found him writing at that table.  At any moment, it seemed, an avalanche of papers might bury the paper he was writing on and even engulf him.  As if he were courting some such geological disaster, he had perched – right on top of the pile, but very nicely over the centre of gravity – a cardboard box of the sort that typewriting paper comes in.  He said that he was making a selection of his poems, waved a hand over the table and gathered in a few sheets from the edge of the table farthest from his chair.  One could see now that the box held the same sort of thing as the most recent stratum deposited on the top of the table – typescript and manuscript of poems, offprints of poems, leaves torn from published volumes.  He had decided that the book should not be a collection of all the poems he had written or published, but only his best.  But this, he explained with a chuckle, raised an awkward problem: once he had decided to leave anything out he couldn’t see why he should leave anything in.  He had already done much of the preliminary work – reading through the published and unpublished poems, picking out poems and passages for revision, marking copy for the typist, drawing up lists of poems for consideration.

One question that vexed him a good deal was the choice of a title for the volume.  He canvassed his friends’ opinion, and asked them to look out for, or think out, some appropriate title.  What he wanted was, not a descriptive title, but some terse symbolic phrase that would catch the spirit of his work.  He asked several of his friends to read through the selection and give a frank comment upon what should be included and what left out.  But no continuous typescript of the selection, or even an ordered arrangement of the typist’s copy, was ever forthcoming when one offered to do the reading: it was still work in progress.  I think the discovery of the right title might have crystallized his choice in an instant.

His work on the selection was interrupted by severe illness in January, 1953.  As soon as he began to recover, he turned his reviving energy to the poems.  But he had less time than he had reason to hope.  Within a few weeks he had suffered an accident from which he failed to recover.  Up till that moment he must have been working on the selection; for there was found on his bedside table a redraft in pencil of the opening lines of a poem he had published nearly twenty-five years earlier – “A Wisdom from the Dead.”  Clearly he was determined to complete the volume for the press himself.  During those last days in hospital he avoided any discussion of the poems; and one could not assail his monumental reticence by making a direct question of the matter.  And so, when he died, he had appointed no literary executor, and had left no instructions – written or verbal – about the projected volume: what the principles of selection were to be, what the current state of the manuscript was, what arrangements had been made for publication.

At the request of G.H.C.’s executor, and after consulting the wishes of his friends, I undertook to prepare for the press a selection of the poems that would represent, as nearly as I could divine it, the poet’s own intentions.  There were delivered to me all the papers that had anything to do with his poetry – offprints, manuscript drafts, a few lists of textual corrections, marked copies of the printed poems.  In the absence of any guiding scheme ­– and the papers were in no special order when gathered up by his executors – one had to determine what poems G.H.C. had wished to include, and to decide which of the variant readings – in some cases profuse – represented his own final version.

Once the papers had been sorted out, it was less difficult than one had expected to decide upon the relative date of his revisions and corrections.  In some cases a poem had been printed in successive collections, or first in a periodical and then in a volume; so it was often possible to identify and assess early revisions that had been overtaken by much later critical consideration.  The relative order of later manuscript emendations was clarified by the accident that G.H.C. had taken to using – some time about 1948 or so – a ball-point pen: it was handy for marking Queen’s Quarterly proofs and accommodated itself to the different sorts of paper the poems were written and printed on.  It is unnecessary to rehearse the details of the procedure by which I decided upon the “best” readings.  In the end there were very few doubtful readings; and most of these have been unequivocally settled by those who could clearly recall conversations with him upon these very details.  For many poems, no manuscript version was to be found; in other cases a great many revisions showed a poem passing through small transformations over a period of many years.  The poems most frequently, drafted and revised – for G.H.C. seems not to have preserved his early working drafts – were not always the best.  Indeed he seems to have worked hard, during the last two or three years, to redeem poems which he felt were not satisfactory in their previously published form.  “For Mary Arden” is an instance.  This poem opens with great charm and delicacy, but later flags; he redrafted it many times, but evidently was never satisfied with it.  Since he had decided to reject juvenilia and poems of partial achievement, I did not include poems of this sort, despite the rich documentation that sometimes went with them. 

The choice represented in this volume fortunately carries much of the poet’s own authority.  Among G.H.C.’s papers there were two provisional lists of poems for the selection: from these the authority of the poet’s own choice is derived.  One list was written with pen and ink in his own hand, giving the titles of eighty-eight poems; a group from each of his last three volumes, and a fourth group headed “New.”  This I call List A.  The other – List B – is written in ink (ball-point pen) in an unidentified hand; it is almost certainly of later date than List A, and gives the titles of forty-nine poems.  List B does not follow in any way the order of List A.  Since List A is made up methodically from the contents of three published volumes, one is led to suppose that List B may have been dictated from memory.  At first I hoped that the “New” poems in List A were arranged in some intentional order; but a careful examination revealed no clear principle of arrangement and that order was rejected as not authoritative.  An interesting feature of List B is that it includes – despite the more rigorous selection – eight titles not shown in List A.  There was a possibility that it was a list of poems to be revised or reconsidered, but the incidence of manuscript revision removed the first possibility, and the coincidence of titles in both lists dismissed the second.  A first selection, based upon G.H.C.’s personal choice, could then be drawn up to include all the titles cited in both lists.  A third list, made on an old typewriter and headed “Readings,” comprises twenty-seven titles: these coincide mainly with the titles common to both Lists A and B, and help to confirm the central titles in those two longer lists.  I do not know for what occasion this group – List R – was drawn up: it was after 1934 and probably before 1945.  In December 1948 G.H.C. recorded his readings of seventeen of his poems for Dr. W. E. McNeill; only ten of those appear in the earlier List R.

Since all these documents are now preserved in the George Herbert Clarke Collection in the Queen’s University Library, there is no need to reproduce them in detail.  It may however be of interest to show how the fifty-two poems finally selected for this volume are distributed through the three lists drawn up by the poet himself.

Lists                            A,B,R     A,B     A,R     A      B     Editor’s Choice

Poems Chosen                16         14        5        8      5                  4

Poems Rejected                4           7        2      31      3

To have arranged the poems in chronological order of composition might have been desirable.  Unfortunately none of the manuscripts was dated; and the order of first publication seemed too arbitrary to have much virtue, since G.H.C. had grouped the poems in each collection according to their subject or intention.  The poems previously collected by G.H.C. have therefore been placed according to his own arrangement within the chronological sequence of the published volumes.  The Odes are grouped together, in order of composition, after the poems from the Halt and Parley volume.  The remaining “New” poems are grouped at the editor’s discretion; they end with what I take to be the last two poems he composed, and the collection closes with the poem he wrote for Sandy Macphail – the nearest thing to a personal epitaph G.H.C. ever wrote.

Among the papers there was eloquent evidence of G.H.C.’s search for an appropriate title for the volume.  On the right hand side of the first page of List B twenty-six provisional titles are written one above the other, in the same unidentified hand as the list of poems; and on the second page of List B – the paper turned sideways – G.H.C. has written in ink (ball-point pen) sixteen titles, only two of which appear in the other list: Ambiguous Star and Well of Silence.  Among the papers were several small slips, about 4 x 4 ¹/₂ inches, on which ten titles were typed.  On one of these slips G.H.C. had written in pencil – the paper turned sideways – “Which one?”  One title – Time and the Hour – has a pencil tick against it; two others have a double tick against them – As the Day Changes and Ambiguous Star.  The last of these is the only title to appear in all three lists.  Although this short list with its pencil marks seems to represent G.H.C.’s latest choice, I was not convinced that he had yet found the title he wanted.  I have therefore chosen a straight-forward descriptive title, but have used as an epigraph the lines of the Queen’s Commemoration Ode from which the most persistent title was taken.

It has been a privilege to be invited to prepare the text of this volume.  My duty with it has been simple and clear: to present a selection of poems such as G.H.C. would have chosen himself, and to print these in the text of his considered revisions.  This would scarcely have been possible without the ready help of a number of Professor Clarke’s friends who had known him for longer and more intimately than I did.  Professor W. O. Raymond has given generously of his time in helping to complete the canon of poems from which the selection was to be made, in reading and commenting upon the manuscript from time to time, and in writing the biographical and critical introduction.  Mrs. Elizabeth Harrison’s sensitive criticism and her intimate knowledge of G.H.C.’s preferences for certain variant readings and versions have been of such peculiar value that her contribution is virtually that of co-editor.  Among the large number of G.H.C.’s friends who have shown an active interest in this book I should like to thank particularly Professor W. E. C. Harrison, Dr. J. A. Gray, Professor R. M. Ogden, Dr. W. Sherwood Fox, and Mr. H. P. Gundy.  Dr. Lorne Pierce has shown great vigour and imagination in all details to do with publication; and his complete collection of G.H.C.’s published poems, now part of the Lorne Pierce Collection in the Queen’s University Library, has been invaluable.  Finally, I wish to thank Miss Elizabeth Clarke for her gracious letters written in reply to my many detailed inquiries about her brother’s poems and about his express wishes in the matter of publication.