There has been a lot of confusion over the term “anthology.” Eighteenth-century scholarship analyzing material modes of production such as Barbara Benedict’s book on the anthology ignore what these artifacts look like, equating miscellanies and anthologies because, as Savir Kaul once said to me, “they are both modular.” However, the interfaces with literature presented by miscellaneous collections, beauties, and anthologies differ dramatically. For instance, there is absolutely no resemblance between a Norton table of contents and index, on the one hand, and whatever front or end matter appears in any eighteenth-century miscellanies. But what do the visual aspects of these various interfaces have to do with anything? Paratextual matter visually carves up the literary world, rendering its objects visible, comprehensible, intellectually manipulable. Ultimately it is precisely the visual, physical distinctions and separations that help bring into existence what has been until most recently our quintessential disciplinary objects.

    Though used in its Greek and Latin forms for the titles of excerpts from Latin poetry and prose, as well as for the Greek Anthology,@See Alan Cameron (The Greek Anthology, 1993) and James Hutton (Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, v. 23 and 28). “anthology” is first Englished in a title by Joseph Ritson, The English Anthology, a collection which unfortunately does not adequately represent the medium. Nor do the volumes called The Annual Anthology (1799-1800) edited by Robert Southey. While A. E. Case and Greg Kucich distinguish between mere collections and anthologies that represent “the tradition” of British literary works, Benedict calls all miscellaneous poetry collections “anthologies.” She can only do so, I would suggest, because she does not go beyond the 1780s in examining poetry collections, and so does not see the profound differences between miscellanies and anthologies.

    Miscellanies collect poetry that has not yet been published by popular as well as anonymous poets: reading it is a way of entering a coterie rather than learning a tradition. Disciplinary anthologies, by contrast, publish only dead poets, their “modern poetry” sections, if they have them, being more miscellaneous in form than anthological – that is, more provisionally defining “the tradition” than the other sections of the collection. Thus, William St. Clair follows Benedict’s lead in calling every poetry collection an “anthology.” However, because he is interested in the Romantic era, in practice, he distinguishes between what I would call “miscellanies” and what I wish to define as the “disciplinary anthology”: “Between 1600 until after 1774, English printed anthologies failed to perform the selecting, canonizing, and memorializing role . . . . which has often been seen as among the essential purposes and characteristics of the genre” (71).@In the elided portion of this quotation, St. Clair claims that manuscript collections of poetry did indeed perform anthologizing functions. I disagree with him about that, and will argue against it below. The anthology properly defined physically incarnates the canon whereas miscellanies and multi-volume collections of British literature do not.

Lootens reminds us that Wendell Harris rejects the “‘seductive apparent parallel’” between literary and biblical canons, but then herself performs an archeology of the term as it came to be applied to texts of whatever sort, insisting on the persistence of its etymology in current conceptions. For Pliny, Lootens points out, a canon was a “model statue”:

About “the language actually used by the [current] debaters” of the canon, Lootens says, “Not only does it slip between lists of texts and [sculptural] figures, but it vividly and repeatedly invokes a mythic canon that has, or is, a place – an architectural canon filled with the solid, plastic figures of High Art” (6).

    At one remove from those physical sculptures, pictures of heads or busts populated early eighteenth-century single-author editions (Barchas 21-22). In 1750, London Magazine began running a series of biographies, and, like the single-author poetry editions published earlier in the century, each biography included a picture of a bust of the author or great man. Pictured memorial sculptures there became detachable from single-author books. Bell does not exactly take advantage of this liberation. He does not deviate from earlier publishing practices surrounding single-author texts. Just as he procured authoritative copytexts from poets’ definitive editions, Bell’s volumes offered as frontispieces portraits of 37 poets drawn and engraved from “BUSTS or PICTURES of the highest authority.”@Morning Post 16 May 1777, qtd. in Bonnell 136. Moreover, Bell groups poems within each oeuvre by genre, offering poems “classed and arranged according to their several kinds, so that the whole of the same species of writing falls under the reader’s eye in one and the same department of the book only.”@Bell, Prior 1:[xlvii], qtd. in Bonnell 134. Poems looking the same in form offer a unified body to the eye.

    Hazlitt’s 1825 anthology contains five heads put together in a kind of collage for its frontispiece. Like those joined heads, Hazlitt’s “biographical and critical notices,” instead of forming individual headnotes, all appear in bulk at the front of the anthology:@This in some ways resembles the state of HTML-generated web pages at our moment – only one head per body; yet, when the separate HTML pages are generated by one TEI document, multiple heads are possible. Unfortunately, TEI garbles the metaphor a bit, since multiple heads occur WITHIN and not before bodies. they therefore form a graphic counterpart to the pictured heads. Just as Sappho’s picture becomes identified in nineteenth-century translations of her poetry with the Greek characters of her name (Prins 69), these notes placed at the beginning of the poetry graphically recapitulate the pictured heads at the book’s front. Southey’s subsequent 1831 anthology moves biographical and critical notices to the beginning of each poet’s oeuvre. In the disciplinary anthology, pictured heads have been replaced with headnotes: the author’s head (headnote) is now no longer pictorial but purely graphic, and it has now also been joined to a body (poems) and feet (footnotes).

    Hazlitt’s Specimens does present authors in chronological order. But unlike George Ellis’s 1790 Specimens of Early English Poets and the anonymously edited 1809 collection Specimens of British Poets from Lord Surrey to Cowper, it does not lay out the table of contents by King’s reign. The first volume to actually periodize in the way that we do is William and Robert Chambers, Readings in English Poetry: A Collection of Specimens from our best Poets From A.D. 1558 to 1860, Chronologically Arranged with Biographical Notices and Explanatory Notes (1865), designed explicitly “as Reading-Books for upper classes in Schools.” Here the periods aren’t named, only dated, but, except for one short period corresponding to the Interregnum, all the periods are ours: Renaissance, Interregnum, Restoration, (short) Eighteenth-Century, Romantic, (early) Victorian. But while Hazlitt’s table of contents doesn’t explicitly periodize, a frontispiece containing heads of authors implicitly does: just as there is a pictured head, there is the age of Chaucer, the age of Shakespeare and Spenser, the age of Milton and Cowley, the age of Young, and the age of Burns. Again, the pictorial precedes its graphic instantiation that will occur later in Chambers’s table of contents.

    Nonetheless, it is precisely picturing authorship in which Hazlitt engages. He tells us in the Preface to his Select British Poets, or New Elegant Extracts from Chaucer to the Present Time that he is intent "to offer the public a Body of English Poetry, from Chaucer to Burns, such as might at once satisfy individual curiosity and justify our national pride" (i): clearly instead of seeing an author as a body, Hazlitt is envisioning “English Poetry” as a whole body. He explicitly attacks previous collections for presenting readers with "a numberless quantity of shreds and patches" rather than a quantity and quality of works sufficient to represent an author's work. The allusion to Lear here clarifies Hazlitt's view: a body of poetic works without an organization and headnotes connecting them to both national poetic history and to the author is like a disinherited King Lear, a king of shreds and patches.

If it doesn’t explicitly name literary periods, and doesn’t join individual poets’ heads to the bodies of their poetry, what makes Hazlitt’s collection explicitly disciplinary is that it reconfigures a “vast collection” of past poets into a canon organized chronologically, forming the ground for disciplinary literary history.@John Aikin’s 1820 Select Works of the British Poets. With Biographical and Critical Prefaces (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820) is another contender for the first disciplinary anthology, as much of what is said here about Hazlitt’s collection is similarly true of Aikin’s. However, Aikin is concerned with educating young schoolboys, including, he says, no poems “unsuited to the perusal of youth. The Work, within these bounds, may be termed a ‘Library of Classical Poetry,’ and may safely be recommended to the heads of Schools in general, and to the libraries of Young Persons” (Preface). It does so visually, in its table of contents.