The Oxford Book Of Contemporary Verse 1945 1980

Retitled reprint of THE OXFORD BOOK OF CONTEMPORARY VERSE, 1945-1980. Poetry from 40 British, American and Commonwealth poets who have emerged since the war

From Tottel's Miscellany (1557) to the last twentieth-century Oxford Book of English Verse (1999), anthologies have been a prime institution for the preservation and mediation of poetry. The importance of anthologies for creating and re-creating the canon of English poetry, for introducing ‘new' programmes of poetry, as a record of changing poetic fashions, audience tastes and reading practices, or as a profitable literary commodity has often been asserted. Despite its impact, however, the poetry anthology in itself has attracted surprisingly little critical interest in Britain or elsewhere in the English-speaking world. This volume is the first publication to explore the largely unmapped field of poetry anthologies in Britain. Essays written from a wide range of perspectives in literary and cultural studies, and the point of view of poets, editors, publishers and cultural institutions, aim to do justice to the typological, functional and historical variety with which this form of publication has manifested itself - from early modern print culture to the postmodern age of the world wide web.

Until now, most teaching has focused on the novel as the most useful way of raising issues of gender, ethnicity, theory, nationality, politics and social class. In The Twentieth Century in Poetry Peter Childs places literature in a wider social context and demonstrates that all poetry is historically produced and consumed and is part of our understanding of society and identity. This student-friendly critical survey includes chapters on: * the Georgians * First World War poetry * Eliot * Yeats * the thirties * post-war poetry * contemporary anthologies * women's poetry * Northern Irish and black British poets It builds a narrative not of poetry in the twentieth century, but of the twentieth century in poetry.

Reference guide to poetry anthologies with descriptions and evaluations of each anthology.

Neil Corcoran's book is a major survey and interpretation of modern British poetry since 1940, offering a wealth of insights into poets and their work and placing them in a broader context of poetic dialogue and cultural exchange. The book is organised into five main parts, beginning with a consideration of the late Modernism of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden and ranging, decade by decade, from the poetry of the Second World War and the `New Romanticism' of Dylan Thomas to the Movement, the poetry of Northern Ireland, the variety of contemporary women's poetry and the diversity of the contemporary scene. The book will be especially useful for students as it includes detailed and lively readings of works by such poets as Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin.

This book guides through some six centuries of English literature, beginning with Chaucer's time, and goes on to analyse the background, interconnections and major achievements of individual writers in each period. It is useful to the student of English literature and to the general reader.