Author Description

Presenting a wide-ranging selection of vital twentieth-century work, Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry contains more than 450 poems by 126 poets, beginning with Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins and ending with Catherine Walsh and Helen Macdonald. It features ample selections from canonical poets including W.H. Auden, Basil Bunting, T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, D.H. Lawrence, Charlotte Mew, Hugh MacDiarmid, Wilfred Owen, Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Dylan Thomas, Edward Thomas, and W.B. Yeats. At the same time, this volume challenges received accounts of modern and contemporary British and Irish poetry by presenting work from many poets--including Mary Butts, Brian Coffey, Nancy Cunard, Elizabeth Daryush, Ivor Gurney, F.R. Higgins, Mina Loy, Thomas MacGreevy, Joseph Gordon Macleod, Charles Madge, Clere Parsons, Lynette Roberts, John Rodker, and Sylvia Townsend Warner--who have never before been represented in this type of collection.Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry covers many groups and movements--from the Georgians to the poets of the New Apocalypse and the Auden group and from the Movement to the New Generation--paying special attention to neglected modernist traditions. It presents a range of post-World War II exploratory poetry by writers including Tom Leonard, Tom Raworth, John Riley, and Maggie O'Sullivan alongside the work of more established figures like Thom Gunn, Tony Harrison, Paul Muldoon, and Craig Raine. It includes poetry by "Black British" writers including James Berry, Jean "Binta" Breeze, David Dabydeen, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jackie Kay, E.A. Markham, and Grace Nichols, and feminist poetry by Fleur Adcock, Caroline Bergvall, Eavan Boland, Carol Ann Duffy, Denise Riley, Anna Wickham, and others. It also provides the complete texts or substantial excerpts of several important long poems. All of the poems are newly and thoroughly annotated, many for the first time. Each poet's selection begins with a critical introduction providing biographical and bibliographical information along with critical commentary. Ideal for general readers and for courses in modern and contemporary British and Irish poetry and literature, this anthology provides an unprecedented, inclusive portrait of the century's poetry in Britain and Ireland.