Great Anthologist Oscar Williams

Oscar Williams was the pen name of Oscar Kaplan (December 29, 1900 – October 10, 1964), an American anthologist and poet.

Life

Williams was born Oscar Kaplan in Lethychiv, Ukraine, son of Jewish parents Mouzya Kaplan and Chana Rapoport. He immigrated to New York at the age of seven.

His first book, Golden Darkness, was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize.

Among his influential anthologies are Master Poems of the English Language, Immortal Poems of the English Language, The Pocket Book of Modern Verse, and the Little Treasury Poetry Series, which were used in colleges and high schools around the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s. During his lifetime, anthologies he edited sold more than two million copies, a nearly unheard amount for books of poetry. Many of his anthologies are still being republished today. Though a friend and promoter of poets like Dylan Thomas and George Barker, Williams' own poetry is not highly regarded by critics, though he published several volumes during his lifetime, and is not nearly as accomplished as the poetry of his wife, Gene Derwood (1909–1954).

Among Williams' poems are "Revenge," "Poem," "Poet," "The Last Supper" and "I Sing an Old Song," and “The City;s Face.

Oscar Williams and his poet-artist wife Gene Derwood sponsored an annual $15,000 poetry award which bears their name. They lived in a penthouse of an office building on Water Street. In his later years, Oscar Williams' home near Wall Street in Manhattan served as a mecca for young poets. Asked how he chose the poems used in his anthologies, he said, "How do you pick one girl to marry? In poetry it's divine polygamy. Generally, when a poem stays with me a long time that poem delivers the goods".

Throughout his life, Oscar Williams eschewed his Jewish background. He was always mysterious about his origins and was buried by an Episcopal Church Church. He was survived by a son, Strephon Kaplan-Williams, who was raised in boarding schools and hardly ever interacted with his parents. His papers are housed at the Indiana University Lilly Library.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Williams

A Blast About Modern Poetry

Modern poetry is a shotgun blast. There are no recognizable standards for universal selection. Plath is recognized because you cannot divorce her from her suicide. Ginsberg you cannot divorce from his beard and little clanging bells, a media invention. Bob Dylan you cannot divorce from his being a song writer and media invention. If you are not a media invention and only a poet, what chance do you have? So Immortal Poems represents classic taste before media took over the American mind. The media is immortal these days, not poetry. Selecting from contemporary poets not using traditional standards would be difficult to do. I would still love to do it. For those interested in Oscar Williams there is information now available on the web. Just search it with oscarwilliams and see what their world was like in the twentieth century.

-- Strephon Kaplan-Williams, in an Amazon.com review of his father’s anthology, Immortal Poems of the English Language, at http://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Poems-English-Language-Williams/dp/0671496107

Afterword by the Blog Author

Master Poems of the English Language was used by the blog author in his undergraduate courses in obtaining an English degree from the University of Washington in 1971.  It is a collection of justly famous poems and spectacularly insightful accompanying essays.  It was perhaps the best collection of English poems and accompanying analyses of the twentieth century.