Author: Michael Schmidt
ISBN/UPC (if available): 1860463517
An anthology including the works of more than a hundred poets whose poems are representative of the century's poetry.
The poems in this book also slip free of their mornings in the history of the century and create new spaces. They are chosen because they are exceptional, profound and unique in what they do to language, regardless of their subject matter or the orientation of the poet. In twentieth century, poems do things they have never done before.
The century's poetry is dominated by mutually exclusive movements that have developed side by side. In its teens, for example, the Imagists rebelled, the Georgians romanticized and the First World War poets witnessed the horror of battle. This anthology charts the emergence and partial eclipse of the defining movement of the century, Modernism; it includes the political optimism of the 1930s poets and their inheritors, the poets who struggled to redefine their art after the Second World War.