Jump to content

Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 67.225.41.226 (talk) at 07:17, 17 June 2023. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 is a poetry anthology edited by W. B. Yeats and published in 1936 by Oxford University Press. A long introductory essay starts from the proposition that the poets included should be all the "good" ones (implicitly the field is Anglo-Irish poetry, though notably a few Indian poets are there) active since the death of Tennyson. In fact the selection of poets is idiosyncratic: late Victorians are strongly represented, while the war poets of the First World War are not. The modernist tendency does not predominate, though it is not ignored; Georgian poetry is covered quite thoroughly; and Oliver St. John Gogarty is given space and praised in the introduction as a great poet.

Yeats was influenced by his personal feelings. Gogarty was a friend, and Yeats also included poems by Margot Ruddock, with whom he was having a relationship, and other friends such as Shri Purohit Swami. He notes that Rudyard Kipling and Ezra Pound are under-represented because paying their royalties would have cost too much. He did not say which of their poems he would have included.

Poets in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935