The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (Oxford Books of Verse)

This is a bad anthology to introduce someone to 20.c. poetry; the selections of many important poets are both too idiosyncratic and too meagre. Besides, the first half of the book includes lots of vaguely interesting doggerel of questionable poetic value. On the other hand, there are several things to be said for it. The first is that Larkin put in a lot of good stuff that is not usually anthologised. Among the inspired selections are Auden's "No Change of Place", "Brussels in Winter" and "Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno"; Kipling's "McAndrew's Hymn"; Edward Thomas's "Team's Head-Brass"; Empson's "Success" and the whole Betjeman section. But most of his selections from particular authors are sensible and predictable. He is very conservative with Eliot and Yeats. Yeats also gets too little space -- 20 pp. as opposed to 24 for Auden and 30 for Eliot. It's nice to see that Larkin has picked some of his own stuff; it's more or less what you'd expect him to have picked, though. Some of his choices are weird -- Peter Porter's "Annotations on Auschwitz" is represented by its clever but not quite self-contained last quatrain -- and of course most of the (many) poems chosen from the early 1900s are not very good. This anthology also functions as a record of Larkin's taste and sense of the poetic tradition of his time, and yields a few parallels with his own poetic practice. There's also an interesting find: J.B.S. Haldane's poem titled "Cancer's a funny thing", for instance, which is the source of the line in Auden's "Miss Gee". Another thing to note about this anthology is that the 1960s were less disconnected from the pre-war era than our generation is, and probably more capable of understanding its verse and appreciating it. Most of the writers of that period -- Davies, Gibson, Masefield, Young -- are now hardly read except in anthologies like this, and it's good and perhaps important that they should be read.