A Map of Modern English Verse [antikvár]

PREFACE This book consists of a General Introduction, followed by fourteen sections, every one of which is devoted to a poet or a group of poets. These sections all contain a biographical and critical introduction, a number of critical passages, a selection of poems and a bibliography. There is also a general bibliography and a list of sources from which the poems have been taken. It will be noticed that, in the passages of criticism, I have relied to a great extent on the poets themselves, despite Donald Davie's astringent warning about trusting Yeats as a guide to his own poetry: Teats was not only the man who wrote the poems; he was also, unfortunately, the first and by no means the most intelligent of those who have attempted to explain them.'' A Map of Modern English Verse is a source book rather than a conspectus of the best critical opinion, and it is partly for this reason that I have given more space to the writings of the poets and their immediate contemporaries than to the exhaustive treatises of academics. But I confess that I would sooner read a page by Shakespeare on Measure for Measure than ninety-nine per cent of the Shakespearean criticism written in our day; just as I would sacrifice almost all the commentaries on The Waste Land for Eliot's account of that poem's genesis. Until I began work on this book I did not suspect how many documents essential for a full understanding of modem English verse were inaccessible to all but a few students of poetry. For example, the three volumes of Some Imagist Poets (1915-1917) have long been out of print, and the 1917 volume is not held by the British Museum or the other copyright Ubraries. Ford Madox Ford's Collected Poems (1913), with its important Introduction, is seldom to be found outside the great libraries, and the Collected Poems (1936), published by OUP, New York, which reprints the Introduction in a slightly difEerent form, appears not to have been distributed in Britain. The first edition of Yeats's A Vision (1935) is hard to come by, and the second edition (1937) omits some interesting material, including the superb Dedication. A Packet for Ezra Pound (1929) is equally rare; and although most of it is incorporated in A Vision (1937), once again there are omissions of several revealing passages. Even the post-war volumes of Yeats's collected prose writings inexcusably omit certain portions of the text without indicating where the cuts have been made. ^ An Honoured Guest, edited by Denis Donoghue and J. R. Mulryne, 1965, p. 79.