The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry from Britain and Ireland [antikvár]

PREFACE Every anthology draws artificial circles around its contents. One circle is the category of the "century". Of course, this is a useful way to indicate that no poem or poet exists in a vacuum. Poets tune into their contemporaries and into contemporary history. That collective work, now entering the 21st century, is what a living tradition means. Yet tradition also stretches further back. It involves what the American poet Donald Hall calls 'conversation' with 'the dead great ones'. 20th century poetry is full of conversations with dead poets from Homer onwards. Again, just as various poetic movements quarrelled and overlapped during the century itself, so poets around 1900 were defining themselves against their immediate predecessors. All this traffic with the past underlines the point that modern poetry is not (as is sometimes claimed) an entirely new species. Certainly it has responded to new circumstances and ideas - but poetry has always done so. And, during the 20th century, poets renewed all the genres whereby poetry tries to make sense of human experience: love poetry, the poetry of family and friendship, the poetry of unhappiness, elegy, epic, pastoral, satire, praise-poems, religious poems, war poems. It was usually critics rather than poets who doubted poetry's scope and stamina during a century which certainly tested them. Yet the testing - as I think this anthology of British and Irish poetry illustrates - was not to destruction. The 20th century was a remarkable century for poetry in the English language. W.B. Yeats thought so as early as 1936 when he said in 'Modern Poetry: A Broadcast': 'The period from the death of Tennyson until the present moment has, it seems, more good lyric poets than any similar period since the 17th century'. To agree with that statement you need not agree with Yeats's own taste as represented by The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936). What counts is his stress on the lyric poem. Yeats dates modern poetry from the 1890s when he and other poets, under the influence of French symbolism, 'wished to express life at its intense moments, those moments that are brief because of their intensity': In the Victorian era the most famous poetry was often a passage in a poem of some length, perhaps of great length, a poem full of thoughts that might have been expressed in prose. A short lyric seemed an accident, an interruption amid more serious work .The aim of my friends, my own aim, if it sometimes made us prefer the acorn to the oak, the small to the great, freed us from many things we thought an impurity. The lyric is hard to define except as 'a short poem'. But Yeats's word 'intensity' associates the 20th century lyric with a special drive n 'i