Subject definition and general semantics

 iii.5.1.Lists and collections of the best or most important literary texts have met with long-standing interest within the discipline of literary studies and among the general reading public, since they offer orientation in an overwhelmingly broad and constantly developing field of national and world literatures. Initiatives such as the ZEIT-Bibliothek der 100 Bücher (1978–1980) or collections of genre-specific literature, such as the Süddeutsche Zeitung: Kriminalbibliothek (2006), The New York Times’ “What is the best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?” (2006), The Guardian’s “The Hundred best Novels Written in English” (2015), Der Kanon. Die deutsche Literatur. Gedichte (2005, ed. Marcel Reich-Ranicki) or Adam L. Gowans’s The Hundred Best Poems (Lyrical) in the English Language (first edition 1903; the book has been published several times to this day) attest to this desire to offer reading recommendations. All of these initiatives pertain in some fashion to the canonization of literature: even if they do not constitute canons themselves, they are based on ideas of canonical literature. Canons have always characterized critics’ and scholars’ negotiations of literature, but an in-depth critical interest in the diverse national histories of canon formations and criticism of canons themselves, together with their mechanisms and selection criteria, only emerged in the USA in the 1960s and in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. As these few initial examples of recommendation lists show, lyric poetry is less present than narrative texts in the public perception of the literary field. This corresponds to a lack of attention paid to poetry by historical canon research, which has primarily focused on prose and drama.

 iii.5.2.Canons are the result of complex processes of selection, evaluation, and interpretation, which vary according to different historical periods and cultures. Canonization instances such as schools, universities, literary prizes, anthologies, etc. participate in intricate processes of selection which are based both on (normative) textual/aesthetic features and on contextual factors such as social and cultural conditions of a certain time (see e.g. Heydebrand 1998, Herrmann 2007). This implies that canons are malleable and change over time, a fact which applies to the material canon, i.e. the texts and authors that are considered canonized, as well as to the canon of interpretation, the patterns of perception and interpretation associated with the texts (see Heydebrand 1998, 613). While some critics emphasize that canons as such develop non-intentionally (Winko 2002), others are interested in the intentionality of certain selection processes (see Rippl and Winko 2013). Like other literary genres, lyric poetry has been valued and evaluated differently throughout the centuries. It is only since the Sturm und Drang period, i.e. with Erlebnislyrik, and Romanticism, that a lyric speaker’s expression of emotions and personal impressions came to be seen as the most important features of lyric poetry, whereas these “genre characteristics” did not meet with appreciation in earlier periods. Hierarchies within the genre of lyric poetry have always existed and are mirrored in canonization processes at different times (Fowler 1979). This article will focus on Anglophone and German-language poetry and discuss canonization processes and their underlying premises in connection with anthologies and university curricula.

Canons in contexts

 iii.5.3.In the context of canon discussions, two fundamental aspects must be distinguished: firstly, the historically varying motivations that lead to canon formation, and secondly, canonization instances and material manifestations of canons such as lists of titles or authors, text compilations (for example in anthologies or digital corpora), literary histories or literary prizes.

Varying motivations for canon formations

 iii.5.4.In the English-speaking world, the earliest—or at least the earliest surviving—printed collection of short lyric poems, Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), is a particularly good example of the values underlying early canonization efforts. Early Modern poetry collections and canons often focus on verbal skill and serve as models. By contrast, the English lyric canon has served a growing national consciousness since the 18th century, which has led to not only authors from classical antiquity, but also more and more English writers becoming canonical. This is reflected, for instance, in Thomas Percy’s successful anthology Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) (see Korte 2000 for a compilation of important anthologies of English and British poetry from Tottel to 1990). Anthologies were also important in the colonies, particularly in relation to independence and nation-building efforts; one example of this is the Canadian poetry anthology The Canadian Forget-Me-Not (Simpson 1837) and the Selections from Canadian Poets (Dewart 1864). Other incentives for canon formation include cultural and socio-political factors. While traditional literary canons usually have a national (sometimes even a nationalist) character and exist in the singular, the English-language gender, queer, race/ethnicity and postcolonial debates of the last forty years have increasingly led to canon pluralization, canon expansions, and the formation of counter-canons, which place the previously excluded literary works of disadvantaged social groups in the spotlight and which make mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion visible (Rippl and Straub 2013; Böhler 1998). This diversification of canons also affect lyric poetry (Schneider 2013, 289). Scholars of literature in German also discuss these issues, albeit with less impact on the material canon. Motivations for canon formation now also include providing a more complete and inclusive representation of national lyrical creation in all its variants, as well as for university and school teaching.

 iii.5.5.A few examples suffice to demonstrate that the varying motivations for canon formation also lead to historically variable evaluation processes, and thus to different material canons. An impressive example of this are the de-canonization processes of a group of American lyric poets, the so-called “schoolroom poets” or “fireside poets”, who were at the forefront of the American canon in the 19th century, but whose very high degree of canonization declined dramatically with the beginning of the 20th century. Among the schoolroom poets was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was extremely popular, including in Great Britain. Decanonization processes can be explained on the one hand by the fact that “the genre of lyric generally experienced a significant loss of popularity since the late 19th century” (Caupert 2013, 297, translated by Ph.L.); on the other hand, the poems of the previously celebrated schoolroom poets met with criticism due to their “conventional forms and often solemn and contemplative content, which was judged to be overly polished and harmonious” (Caupert 2013, 297, translated by Ph.L.). Examples of late canonization include Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein. One of the best-known examples in the German-speaking world is Friedrich Hölderlin, who was initially considered an author of lesser importance and was only established as a canonical poet at the beginning of the 20th century (see Link 1998, 387f.).

 iii.5.6.The overview of motivations and examples of canon transformation clearly demonstrate that values play an important role in canon-formation (Heydebrand and Winko 1996). This is reflected in various ways in canon theories. Whereas in the 20th century, formalist and structuralist canon researchers tended to take aesthetic “textual properties as the criterion for evaluating literary artefacts” (Grübel 2013, 31, translated by Ph.L.; see also Freise 2013), and thus as an incentive for inclusion in the canon, social-historical, poststructuralist, feminist and postcolonial theories of value and valuation emphasized the role of social norms, and their contextual models considered education, economy, nation and identity as important factors and motivations for canonization (seeStarre 2013). In the course of the American civil rights movement since the 1960s and French feminism since the 1980s, ideological critique intensified, questioning blind spots in aesthetic norms, values and theories of evaluation in order to combat the marginalization of women and people of color. The integration of postcolonial literature and poetry into school curricula and reading lists, which accompanied the critique of colonialism, also led to an examination of literary-aesthetic values and of the theories on which they rest. In particular, the debates at British and US universities in the 1980s and 1990s reveal that socio-cultural and political aspects (Smith 1988; Guillory 1993) played an important role in the processes of evaluating poetry, which cast into doubt the earlier understanding of the autonomy and objectivity of aesthetic values.

Canonization instances and material manifestations of canons

 iii.5.7.Among the central instances of poetry canonization are the publishing industry and the book trade; print and digital media; literary reviews and criticism; literary histories; anthologies; curricula of schools and universities; literary museums and memorials; writer’s homes; poetry prizes and competitions, as well as the activities of archives, libraries, and the scientific advancement of lyric (see Rippl and Winko 2013, 120–263 ; Literary Critique of Lyric Poetry). While lyric poetry has been regarded as a genre of the highest relevance and of particularly pronounced symbolic value in both German and English-speaking countries since the Early Modern period, and although it occupies a high position in the genre hierarchy (for some critics lyric poetry is even the most original and most important literary genre), it has become apparent since at least the second half of the 20th century that this valuation is no longer reflected in people’s reading practices. This is despite the fact that the Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to several poets—such as Derek Walcott in 1992, Seamus Heaney in 1995, Herta Müller in 2009, Bob Dylan in 2016 (for his song lyrics), and Louise Glück in 2020—and even though the British poet laureates of the last 40 years—Ted Hughes, Andrew Motion, Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage—have played an important role in public life in the United Kingdom.

 iii.5.8.In what follows, the focus will be on German- and English-language anthologies and university curricula, because these not only play a central role in canonization processes, but also provide a particularly lucid account of national histories of the lyric canon, in addition to influential literary histories (Jannidis 2013; Grabes 2013). Anthologies are based on gestures of inclusion and exclusion, in which other cultural values (e.g. national consciousness, national literature) and value systems play a formative role (Korte, Schneider and Lethbridge 2000; Smith 1988) alongside aesthetic values (which themselves already participate in a cultural value system). The characteristic feature “of anthologies is [...] the selection of texts from a larger pool and their novel combination in the form of a compact collection”—texts which are then “legitimized as canonical by universities and schools due to their cheaper availability in book form" (Lethbridge 2013, 179; Lethbridge 2014; translated by Ph.L.).

 iii.5.9.Anthologies of selected works of poetry from particular nations in the English-speaking world (e.g. The Oxford Anthology of English Poetry [Wain 2003], The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry [Kinsella 2009], The Norton Anthology of American Literature [Levine 2017], the counter-project The Heath Anthology of American Literature [Lauter 2002], or the Columbia Anthology of American Poetry [Parini 1995]) or of literary movements (e.g. Ezra Pound’s Des Imagistes, 1914) and groups (e.g. Herbert Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth-Century, 1921) suggest the representativeness of a national lyrical production and are frequently used in teaching. However, since the 1980s, the selection criteria for these anthologies have been criticized for operating as mechanisms of the exclusion of marginalized social groups or ethnicities (gender and race)—such as the Anthology of American Literature (Davis 1966), which included very few African-American authors—that subsequently led to new poetry collections and canon pluralizations. Further examples of such corrective enterprises that aim to counter the under-representation of other ethnicities or women poets in anthologies, and thus to resist hegemonic and institutional positions of power (see von Heydebrand and Winko 1996; Rippl and Straub 2013), include the Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry (Rampersad and Herbold 2005); Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (Banerjee, Kaipa and Sundaralingam 2010); When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (Harjo, Howe and Foerster 2020); Catherine Kerrigan’s An Anthology of Scottish Women Poets (1991); Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance (Honey 2006), and Linda France’s anthology of British and Irish women poets of the 1970s-1990s, Sixty Women Poets (France 1993).

 iii.5.10.One important difference to note between German and English-speaking countries is that whereas literary anthologies play a major role in the English-speaking world and shape university curricula and compulsory, exam-related reading lists, this does not apply to the same extent in German-speaking countries, even though the reasons for this are far from obvious. The First-Year English Reading List of University College London for the academic year 2023-24 explicitly recommends (as in previous years) the purchase of the Norton Anthology of Poetry for the successful completion of literature courses. At many German-speaking universities, exam-related reading lists for poetry in English and American Literature are likewise based on the Norton Anthology of Poetry, the Norton Anthology of American Literature, the Norton Anthology of English Literature, or the Heath Anthology of American Literature.

 iii.5.11.In the German-speaking world, the anthology that is considered to have been the first to claim to bring together the “best” poems was the collection Mehr außerleßener geticht anderer / Teutschen Pöeten (Opitz 1624, ‘More selected poems by other German poets’), edited by Julius Wilhelm Zincgref and published as an appendix to Martin Opitz’s poems. Neukirch’s collection of Baroque poems, which appeared in seven volumes between 1695 and 1727, is credited with both creating an identity and setting an example by selecting those texts that were deemed valuable (Neukirch 1965, see Wiedemann 1970, 41). Since the 18th century, the number of lyric anthologies has steadily increased (see the brief overview in Großens 2016, 301f.), and in the 19th century, this form of distribution even became the most important medium for communicating lyric poetry, including from a commercial perspective (see Häntzschel 1997, 155–159), despite already being subject to criticism at the time (see Dembeck 2017, 145). Two types predominate here: the anthology of the so-called Blütenlese [‘florilegium’] variety, which aims to bring together the best and exemplary poems, and the anthology according to the Gesamtschau [‘general overview’] model, which aims to document and strives for representativeness (see Pforte 1969, XXII, XXIVf.). Both have a canonizing effect in a material sense, given that they select, from a large number of poems, the “best” or the “most important” texts for a particular period, cultural area, or theme. The most widespread poetry anthologies of the 19th century include Ernst Theodor Echtermeyer’s Auswahl deutscher Gedichte für die untern und mittlern Classen gelehrter Schulen [‘Selection of German poems for lower and middle secondary school classes’] (1836, numerous editions until 2010), Elise Polko’s Dichtergrüße (Polko 1860, 15th ed. 1896) and Maximilian Bern’s Deutsche Lyrik seit Goethe’s Tode [‘German poetry after Goethe's death’] (Bern 1877, 18th ed. 1922). The impact of these anthologies—in part through their use in schools—on the educated middle-class view of “good poetry” has not yet been sufficiently studied, nor has the role that they play as a point of reference or as a demarcation for contemporary authors. Some isolated research has been carried out (e.g. Paefgen 1990, Bark 1993) on this topic, including the one on the reception of contemporary poetry by composers who garnered song texts from anthologies (on Reger, see Popp 2014, 78f.). Well-known examples for the 20th century are Kurt Pinthus’ collection of contemporary poems Menschheitsdämmerung (1919, numerous editions, Pinthus 1959), which became synonymous with expressionist lyric, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s anthology Museum der modernen Poesie (Enzensberger 1960), which introduced international modern poetry to the German-speaking world and considerably shaped its image.

 iii.5.12.In the current university training of Germanists in the German-speaking world (as of 2024), the practice of teaching lyric differs from the teaching of narrative and drama. Poetry anthologies do not play a prominent role: some reading lists include recommended individual titles of poems or volumes of poetry, others contain generic indications such as “Poems by Goethe”, and still others refer to anthologies (see Eckardt et al. forth.). In this respect, the university canonization of poetry differs considerably from that of prose and drama, for which only individual works are significant. The list of poetry anthologies recommended to students is broad and reveals that there is no unanimity: hardly any one anthology can be found on more than three lists (see Eckardt et al. 2024; 42 reading lists from German-language institutes of German studies were analyzed). This also applies to anthologies that were compiled specifically for teaching at schools and universities, such as Deutsche Lyrik vom Barock bis zur Gegenwart (Hay and Steinsdorf 1980, various editions), as well as to more popular-oriented anthologies such as Das große deutsche Gedichtbuch (Conrady 1977, various editions and reprints), Der Neue Conrady (Conrady 2000) or Reclams großes Buch der deutschen Gedichte (Detering 2007). Generally inexpensive, period-specific collections of poetry, such as Gedichte des Barock (Maché 1980) or Gedichte der Romantik (Frühwald 1984), are also occasionally cited in isolation. Poetry anthologies focused on diversity are virtually absent on university reading lists in the German-speaking world. One exception is the anthology Frauen / Lyrik, edited by Anna Bers (2020), which brings together poems written by women and which was included in two reading lists.

Contemporary practices, methods, and debates

 iii.5.13.Contemporary practices, methods and debates relate to canon expansions in the contexts of medialization, popularization, digitalization and transnationalization. Important contemporary methods within canon research today include quantitative methods, i.e. the use of large corpora of text that are analyzed using machine processes, as well as the evaluation of data from the internet and social media, which can reveal patterns of canonization (Jannidis 2013, van Dalen-Oskam 2023). With the help of these digital humanities practices, hypotheses of traditional canon research can be tested and further developed, for example the influence of perceived authorial gender on the attribution of literary merit (Koolen 2018), the circulation of texts, and the readership of Anglophone postcolonial literature and world literature(s) or texts that are received in translated form (Walkowitz 2015). Google Trends and Google Books Ngram also enable access to large amounts of data and index the influence of authors (Thomsen 2017, 2020).

 iii.5.14.Debates on transnationalization (Hitchcock 2020) take place in the context of world literature and cosmopolitan canons (Damrosch 2006; Schoene 2013). Thomson (2008) describes how the postcolonial counter-canon (Madsen 1999) was absorbed into the canon of world literature. In current debates on world literature, evaluation processes and the resulting shifts in the canon are no longer conducted primarily from the perspective of aesthetic innovation or the universality of works, but increasingly in relation to socio-cultural and political considerations on the circulation, reception and translation policy of works. With regard to world literature, reference is often made to the dominant role of the English language (Walkowitz 2015; Mufti 2016; Helgesson and Vermeulen 2016) in the market, and to the neoliberal economic interests that largely determine the global circulation of literary works. Media corporations such as Netflix, Amazon, Google and Hulu control the global late-capitalist market of the 21st century with their algorithms and AI-marketing strategies, which presumably also has an impact on reading behavior and the distribution of the symbolic capital and cultural prestige of lyric.

 iii.5.15.In addition to the expansion or new formations of canons, there is increasing reflection on the medialization and popularization processes: “Medializations and intermedial transfers are central factors in the formation of the canon of British literature, whose history can no longer be discussed today without reference to the media landscape”, according to Schneider (2013, 294, translated by Ph.L.; see also Schneider 2012). Biopics of poets such as Sylvia Plath (Sylvia, Jeffs 2003) and adaptations of literary works in other media, e.g. films, video and streaming series (Netflix, Prime, etc.) or comics and graphic novels, have led to a surge in popularization. Medialization was already an important aspect in historical canonization processes of poetry, for exemple in medieval English folk ballads (from oral to written text) or the poems of Anne Bradstreet, which were written in Puritan New England in the 17th century and published in London (from handwritten manuscript to printed book). Today, performative formats such as slam poetry and digital formats are playing an increasingly important role. Initial research has been done on the evaluation behavior of the slam poetry audiences, which differ from more traditional poetry readers (see Ditschke 2022). The presence of poems on the internet and digital literature portals is also likely to play a role in the canonization of contemporary poetry that must not be underestimated. The website Best Poetry Anthologies (180 books). The best, most comprehensive and or entertaining anthologies of verse in English (Goodread 2024) provides a good example. One initiative to promote the genre of poetry is Netzwerk Lyrik, which has been operating since 2018 (Netzwerk Lyrik 2024). Another example is Amanda Gorman’s poem "The Hill We Climb", which she read at the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the USA in 2021. It was quickly included in university and school curricula and gained widespread notoriety, not only because of the young poet’s impressive performance, but also because of its availability on the internet portals of the major American television networks and on numerous literary websites such as LitCharts.com (https://www.litcharts.com/). Under certain conditions, this places the poem in a good position to achieve canonical status.

Topics for further investigation

 iii.5.16.New developments and debates in the field of lyric poetry anthologies currently revolve around important contemporary issues such as the Anthropocene, the Covid pandemic or queerness: e.g., The Ecopoetry Anthology (Fisher-Wirth 2013), Queer Nature. A Poetry Anthology (Walsh 2022, an anthology that collects nature poetry by contemporary LGBTQIA+ voices), Poetry and Covid-19: An Anthology of Contemporary International and Collaborative Poetry (Caleshu and Waterman 2021), Singing in the Dark: A Global Anthology of Poetry Under Lockdown (Satchidanandan and Chawla 2020) or And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again: Writers from Around the World on the Covid-19 Pandemic (Stavans 2020). However, it will only be possible to judge in a few years’ time whether canonization trends are emerging here, and whether we can properly speak of the formation of new sub-canons of poetry.

 iii.5.17.The areas of slam/spoken poetry and e-poetry/digital poetry/electronic poetry are also likely to receive more scholarly attention from canon researchers (the latter raises important questions regarding the connection between storage capacity, digital archiving/repositories and canonization processes).

 iii.5.18.Overall, it can be noted that the canonization of poetry in general, and of lyric poetry in particular, has by no means been exhaustively researched. There is a lack of material-based analyses of long-term developments in the canonization of this genre, as well as in-depth studies on the canon-related positions of individual lyricists and their genesis. The obvious assumption that lyric poetry in particular is canonized via the author’s name, i.e. passed on as part of a canonical author’s oeuvre, also requires examination.