The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse [antikvár]

Introduction This collection now contains 175 poems by 86 poets and ranges !|) chronologically from W. B. Yeats, who was born in 1865, to Geoffrey Hill, who was seven years old when Yeats died in 1939. The youngest generation, of poets still under twenty-five, many of whom have not yet produced a book, is unrepresented; and perhaps the word 'contemporary' in the old title, which is retained for familiarity's sake, is already an umbrella with absurdly i. long spokes when it has to provide cover both for Yeats, Eliot, i Auden, Dylan Thomas, and their contemporaries and for the ! poets who have established themselves in the nineteen-fifties. jt j Small changes were made in several earlier reprints of the antho- ) logy, which was first published in 1950, but the present edition is the first to add a considerable number of poems to the original , collection and to attempt to bring up to date the commentaries accompanying the individual selections. Nearly a third of the poems now assembled are new. A few of the additional poems t are by poets already represented - I have seized the opportunity to include Part 11 of T. S. Eliot's Little Gidding (which I was unable to use in 1948) and to add later pieces by W. H. Auden, > Roy Fuller, Norman Nicholson, and a few others — but four out of every five of the new poems are by poets whose work was either unpublished or virtually unknown at the beginning of the last decade. The character of the anthology can be simply indicated. It is '' a representative collection of English verse written between 1918 and i960. This statement is not quite accurate to the letter. There are several pieces composed earlier than 1918 - pieces, for example, by Isaac Rosenberg and Edward Thomas - but even here the impact of the poems on readers came somewhat later. It ' should be explained that English verse means 'written by English poets', not verse in English. In 1948 I thought it necessary to apologize for the omission of American poets (and, to be logical, I should have added Commonwealth poets), but the publication