This volume of "Modern British Poetry" was copyrighted in 1920, reprinted in 1925, and contains poems by the following: Thomas Hardy (including my fav., "The Darkling Thrush"), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, A. E. Housman, William Butler Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, G. K. Chesterton, D. H. Lawrence, Seigfied Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, and many others.
Most of the poets I've listed above were alive when this volume was first published. What a thrill to read the table of contents and see only the dates of their birth; to consider a time in history when they were all alive, possibly well, and perhaps still writing.
But what I find most fascinating about this collection is the use of the word "modern" in the title. The modernist movement was just getting underway when this collection was published. Between printings, a youngish T. S. Eliot -- an American writing in England -- would published "The Waste Land." Seven years previous, he gave the world "Prufrock."
Those poems are not included here. They wouldn't have to wait long, but it would be another day before they were collected into anything similar. By then, only a handful of the poems included in this library sale treasure would be considered valuable enough to stand beside the peach-stained rolled trousers of Alfred J. Prufrock.
No comments:
Post a Comment