Product Description

Philip Larkin's Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse provoked controversy and dispute on first publication in 1973. Warmly welcomed by fellow poets John Betjeman and W.H. Auden, it was also considered a quirky and idiosyncratic collection by some critics. Today it is recognized as a fine and wide-ranging selection of modern verse, valuable not least because it reflects the tastes of one of the best, and best-loved, English poets of the twentieth century. As the successor to W.B. Yeats's Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935, this anthology made a radical re-assessment of the century's achievement in poetry; it represented verse that was `lighter in tone, more understated, more casual, more conversational, more colloquial, in a way more democratic and more domestic than it was for Yeats'. It also introduced many little-known poets whose names have not entered the canon, and whose contributions add colour and depth to the anthology. As Philip Larkin writes in his Preface, in choosing poems rather than individuals he has brought together `poems that will give pleasure to their readers both separately and as a collection'. For this latest reissue, the poet's biographer Andrew Motion has written a new Foreword in which he considers the nature of Larkin as editor.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #59159 in Books
• Published on: 1972-03-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 692 pages

Review
"I am happy to see Mr. Larkin's taste in poetry and my own are in agreement ... I congratulate him most warmly on his achievement."--W. H. Auden in The Guardian.

About the Author
Philip Larkin's best-known poetry collections (all Faber) include The Less Deceived (1955); The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). Recent editions of his letters, and a biography by Andrew Motion have revived interest in the man as well as the poet.

Customer Reviews

Twentieth Century Verse
Readers of Larkin's excellent letters will have come across frequent complaints about his 'Oxford Book of Two Cent Verse' as he dismissivly calls it. Although he found the task of producing it onerous, it's very good -- if one accepts it for what it is.

Anthologies, having limited space, make a choice between representing the best writers at length, or representing a larger number of writers more briefly. Larkin chooses the latter: the book includes 584 poems by about 200 poets, which this means that many poets (outside the "greats" -- Hardy, Yeats and Eliot -- who are all fully represented) are represented by as little as two poems.

But this approach has virtues. Larkin includes poems by many poets who aren't considered "major writers"; and who, while often well-known in their lives, are not likely to be known to readers now. This is interesting, of course, as it reminds a reader that poets are not only influenced by the best writers, but also by the second best. There is also, perhaps, an attempt here to sketch a certain tradition of English twentieth century writing: one that, although it includes Eliot and Basil Bunting, is in the main, colloquial, unheroic and keen to document domestic events and emotions in poetry that is, if not strictly formal, at least nodding at formal arrangement.

Lovers of Larkin, or of the sort of poetry outlined above, may well find themselves overjoyed by this anthology. Readers whose tastes are for the outlandish, excessive and outragous may be impatient. Personally I think that poetry is at its healthiest when these two groups are not entirely separated: when they both can agree on certain writers to admire; and when both of them at least are aware of and respectful of the other's tastes.

Perhaps people who find themselves entirely in accord with this anthology should also look at Rosenthal's 'Poetry in English' -- a dull name but a fantastic anthology -- for an alternative view of Twentieth Century poetry. (And perhaps, for fuller coverage of the post-1960s poets, Lucie-Smith's 'British Poetry Since 1945'; and for a look at where this alternative English tradition can lead to, Crozier and Longville's 'A Various Art' or Sinclair's 'Conductors of Chaos'.) And for the opposite group: this anthology, with the reminder that Pound, the key figure in the Modernist movement, thought very highly of the key poetic figure in Larkin's English tradition, Thomas Hardy.