Contemporary [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Anyone who composes an anthology of contemporary poetry and essays to write a criticai commentary on his selection is made quickly aware of both the difficulty and the fascination of the attempi. It is easier to anthologize and to write about, for example, the poetry of the seventeenth Century. We have come to a perspective of the spirit of the age and we have had over three hundred years in which to clarify our standards of assessment. Even then, discoveries are made and changes in emphasis take place, so that an anthology of seventeenth-century poetry composed today would have a différent emphasis from one compiled a hundred years ago. There will be poems common to both anthologies but we should expect to see more of the poetry of Herbert and Donne in the anthology of today than we should find in the older one. So, too, a modem anthology of English verse will dififer from one composed a hundred years ago in its selection from the common field. As T. S. Eliot says in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism : ' no generation is interested in art in quite the same way as any other; each generation, like each individual, brings to the contemplation of art its own catégories of appréciation, makes its own demands upon art, and has its own uses for art'. Palgrave's Golden Treasury, a superb collection in its time, is not the anthology a mid-twentieth Century Palgrave would give us even though he would include many of the poems his ancestor had included. A new poet is sometimes discovered, for example Thomas Traherne, who died in 1674 and whose work was discovered only in our own Century. Nevertheless, a recognized corpus of poetry has survived because it has continued to give pleasure and be-cause it has consistently stood up to the criticai assessments of succeed-ing générations. Contemporary appeal and permanent value Contemporary tastes and standards are not, however, always reliable. Young's Night Thoughts, Moore's Lalla Rookh, Bailey's Festus and