An anthology where most poets get 2 pages of poems (Yeats, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Auden, Lowell, and Ashbery get 4), a page of photos and a page-long introduction. The editor points out that "all of [the poetry was] written to be read, and to be read aloud, though not in the first instance to be performed. Each of the poets in this book intends the poem to be sounded". He's excluded some difficult poets, though he adds that "The problem most readers have is that they want to understand through paraphrase. They want to compel the poem to make a prose statement. ... Few make sense in the way prose makes sense ... No good poem makes common sense: the essence of a good poem is the uncommonness of the sense it makes. It is a structuring of words in which many meanings, or meanings at many levels, are enacted. If we read poems as prose, they have very little to say" (p.4)
Edna St. Vincent Millay is there. So is Betjeman and CH Sisson. The introductions aren't always neutral - "[Larkin] did as much as Housman to turn back the clock of English poetry" (p.153). The poetry's not as knock-out as I thought it would be. I liked "Imagine a forest/ A real forest" (WS Graham).
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