I think I have happened upon a lost Charles Williams poem. At least, after a cursory look in prominent sources on Williams, I find no mention of it. I found it in an original compilation by Harry H. Mayer, The Lyric Psalter: The Modern Reader’s Book of Psalms (Liveright, 1940). Mayer notes in his short foreword that:
The poems of this book have all been specifically written for inclusion in this publication. They might rightly be classified as essentially a pioneer work. Woven around the psalms of the Bible they should carry a message old as the story of man, new as tomorrow's sunrise and covering the entire circumstance of living. The method of procedure followed by the contributing poets was left to their own discretion. When the poet's version of his assigned part had been accepted, it was criticized and such changes or re-writes as sometimes seem to be called for were agreed upon. . . . Not only with regard to procedure were the poets of the present volume untrammeled. They were allowed complete freedom with regard also to the substance and thought of their interpretations.
The contributors range though traditional and modernist poets, including (alphabetically), among others, W.H. Auden, Witter Bynner, Padraic Colum, John Cournos, Lord Dunsany, Louis Golding, Shane Leslie, Louis MacNeice, Thoma Moult, L.A.G. Strong, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Charles Williams. Some authors contributed more than one poem.
Williams's single contribution, a rendition of Psalm 146 under the title of "Put Not Your Trust in Human Strength" (pp. 292-294), is reproduced below. His biographical sketch (pp. 349-350) follows after the poem. The whole book was reprinted in 1944
by Liveright under the title The Modern Reader’s Book of Psalms.
This is very interesting - many thanks!
ReplyDeleteIt's new to me, as far as I can tell!
It's intriguing that it is an American publisher - the fame of which/whom I am embarrassed to say I had no immediate proper sense of - and equally intriguing that, the WorldCat suggests, the compiler was an American Rabbi.
Funny it does not mention Taliessin through Logres (1938) in the biography, or, for that matter, Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury (1936), as both would be among the most recent works in verse in 1940.
The Claremont School of Theology copy is scanned among Texts to Borrow in the Archive, I see.
It is probably singable - I wonder which tunes one of those handy hymnals which matches metre of text and tune would suggest? My immediate general thoughts are of Sir Philip Sidney and John Milton - but there were probable many, many English metrical Psalm versifiers.
I also wonder if this contact arose through Williams OUP connections with US publishers?
David Llewellyn Dodds
We have no idea how long Mayer took in compiling the book. He might have received the Charles Williams poem before Taliessin through Logres (1938), though we do know that The Lyric Psalter was published on 25 May 1940.
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