Not much happens in The Anthologist. The first sentence of the novel introduces its protagonist and narrator, poet Paul Chowder. Thereafter, the reader watches as Paul struggles to overcome a crippling (and often comic) aboulia. Paul has redacted an anthology of rhymed poetry, but he must author an introduction in order to send the book to print and receive payment from his publisher.

Paul’s inability (or perhaps unwillingness) to complete this preface results in the deterioration of his long-term relationship with girlfriend Roz, who had supported him financially through his recent years of writing. Though his break-up and eventual reunion with Roz resemble something of a subplot, The Anthologist is dominated by Paul’s musings on literary history and poetic theory.

Mr. Chowder is, if we may trust his own admissions, a well-regarded poet. He states, “If I could only have written a good flying spoon poem back three years ago when I first wanted to, I might be poet laureate right now. Maybe. Probably not. But maybe.” Yet in spite of such success, Paul regards his life with disdain. As he remarks at the commencement of the novel, “My life is a lie. My career is a joke. I’m a study in failure.”

Although he has built a career writing unrhymed, free-verse works, Paul believes that true poems must rhyme (hence the aspiration to produce a new anthology of rhymed poetry). In the throws of procrastination, Paul presents his reader with an account of twentieth-century poetic history in which true poetry has withered as a result of the malignancy that was Ezra Pound. Pound, according to Paul, was a “blustering bigot,” “humorless jokester,” and “talentless pasticheur,” a traitor against the United States more deserving of execution than literary and intellectual admiration.

The narrative that Paul presents is interesting, if at times prejudiced or myopic. It renders an anti-Modernist story that, in the face of Modernist hegemony, still remains absent from most poetic histories. Paul lauds the work of such poets as Algernon Swinburne, Sara Teasdale, Vachel Lindsay, Karl Shapiro and Louise Bogan, all of whom he regards as bulwarks against the corruptions of Pound and Eliot. Yet his distaste for High Modernism is inevitably tempered by the complex intellectual genealogies of the contemporary poetic world. Despite his hatred for Ezra Pound, Paul remains affectionate toward both Auden and Merwin (who were themselves heavily influenced by Pound and Eliot).

Mr. Chowder also takes aim at the world of contemporary poetry, though he does so with less vehemence. He dislikes Billy Collins, despite admitting that he knows very little about Billy Collins. He describes Marry Oliver as his “favorite poet at the moment” and holds Merwin’s The Vixen as one of his “favorite books of poems.” In response to the contemporary world of literary journals, Paul expresses frustration at the “flaccidness” that passes for poetry in prominent publications such as The New Yorker. He posits that the ubiquity of poetry has damned it to intellectual malaise and suggests that nothing would better resuscitate the art than to stop, for some period of time, “the spume of poetry that’s just blowing out of the sulphurous flue-holes of the earth.”

Interwoven through these patchwork rants, Paul also presents a theory of poetry. He regards the four-stress line as the natural line of the English language, and dismisses pentameter as a French import. The five stress meter, in Paul’s view, is a fiction. True pentameter, he argues, is a six stress line (with a sixth beat to be counted in the pause, or musical rest, at the end of each line). A line of five stresses (rather than six) requires enjambment, but he dismisses enjambment (like free verse) as yet another poetic corruption.

These propositions, like his tendency to dismiss traditional methods of scanning in favor of musically scoring a poem, are contestable, and in many regards, problematic. A reader disinterested in the mechanics of poetry would likely find such discussions burdensome and pedantic. Similarly, the reader unversed in poetic history might well regard Paul’s extensive commentaries as esoteric rather than argumentative. But for the lover of poetry, The Anthologist proves provocative, comical, and insightful.

Paul exemplifies the anti-poet. He accepts the reality that most of his work will prove, in the long term, inconsequential. Because he rejects the traditional historical narrative of contemporary poetics, Paul understands the vulnerability of his own work to the “flaccidness” he reviles. Thus, he cannot, like so many professional poets of today, teach creative writing in a university setting. He cannot, in good conscience, participate in the propagation of flaccid poetry by giving sanction to the work of students who write with neither talent nor conviction.

Paul is a conundrum, a poet who, by his own admission, is not entirely sure whether he actually likes poetry. Such a protagonist may not engage the commonplace reader, especially as he is set within a novel of little to no narrative development. Yet to the poet (and in particular, the poet who questions the institutional fixtures of today) Paul provides a fascinating snap-shot of motive, psyche, and aspiration.