Publisher Description

This epoch-marking anthology presents a map of poetry from Britain and Ireland which readers can follow. You will not get lost here as in other anthologies. Instead, Edna Longley shows you the key poets of the century, and through interlinking commentary points out the connections between them as well as their relationship with the continuing poetic traditions of these islands. Poets include Yeats, Hardy, Graves, Eliot, W H Auden, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and others

Notes

A modern anthology for the general reader asw well as students, covering only the key British and Irish writers of the last century. Excluding minor and fashionable authors, the works of less than 40 major writers are presented in depth and with a linking commentaries.

Author Biography

Edna Longley is a Professor Emerita in the School of English, Queen's University Belfast. Her publications include an edition of Edward Thomas's prose writings, A Language Not To Be Betrayed (1981) from Carcanet, and four critical books: Louis MacNeice: A Study (1988) from Faber, and Poetry in the Wars (1986), The Living Stream: Literature & Revisionism in Ireland (1994) and Poetry & Posterity (2000) from Bloodaxe. She also edited The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry (2000) and Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008).

Kirkus US Review

Those not repelled by the pomposity of the back-cover copy ("there is no place here for the poet as entertainer," etc.) might actually find themselves, well, entertained by this assemblage of 20th-century works by poets from the British Isles, with the occasional American or New Zealander thrown in for good measure. Longley stresses in her brisk preface the dominance of the lyric mode, in which "the common factor is concentration," and she argues that the differences between "urban" and "rural" poetries are not as glaring as one might at first assume. Crucial to the poems of the century were the effects of industrialization, especially as manifested in urbanization and, to an even greater degree, war. Thomas Hardy dryly observes that "After two thousand years of mass / We've got as far as poison-gas." The number of pages allotted to each of the 59 contributors peaks at 13 (for Auden), and brief critical/biographical notes preface all the entries, which are organized chronologically. We are reminded, for instance, that Stevie Smith was so nicknamed "because her fringe resembled that of the jockey Steve Donaghue." T.S. Eliot, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, and W.B. Yeats are all here, and their positions are secure; of course, it is more difficult to predict the staying power of poets still writing today, although Seamus Heaney and Thom Gunn are likely candidates. Whether anthologists of 21st-century verse will include Medbh McGuckian or Tom Leonard (the latter, employing Glaswegian dialect, morphs W.C. Williams's "This Is Just to Say" into "Jist ti Let Yi No") is anyone's guess. Enlightening and entertaining, though not essential. (Kirkus Reviews)

Long Description

This epoch-marking anthology presents a map of poetry from Britain and Ireland which readers can follow. You will not get lost here as in other anthologies. Instead, Edna Longley shows you the key poets of the century, and through interlinking commentary points out the connections between them as well as their relationship with the continuing poetic traditions of these islands. Poets include Yeats, Hardy, Graves, Eliot, W H Auden, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and others

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