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TheOxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 is apoetry anthology edited and introduced byW. B. Yeats and published in1936 byOxford University Press.[1]
Yeats begins his long introduction by saying that he has tried to include "all good poets who have lived or died from three years before the death ofTennyson to the present moment".[2] Implicitly the field is English-language poetry of Great Britain (which Yeats refers to throughout as "England") and Ireland, though notably a few Indian poets are included. Other thanT.S. Eliot andEzra Pound, American poets are specifically excluded.[3][4]
In fact, many found the selection of poets to be idiosyncratic.[3][5] LateVictorians are strongly represented andGeorgian poetry is covered quite thoroughly. Themodernist tendency does not predominate, though it is not ignored. Yeats excludes mostwar poetry of the First World War, explaining his distaste by quotingMatthew Arnold: "passive suffering is not a theme for poetry".[6]
Yeats represented his own friends generously,[7] includingOliver St. John Gogarty andShri Purohit Swami, as well asMargot Ruddock, with whom he was having a relationship. Gogarty is represented by seventeen poems, more than anybody else and three more than Yeats himself. He is also given a prominent position in the centre of the volume and praised in the introduction as "one of the great lyric poets of our age".[8][9]
In all, the volume includes 97 writers and 379 poems.[10] Of these, sixteen are Irish.[3] Ten are women, with strong representation of those of the 1920s and 1930s, such asFrances Cornford,Vita Sackville-West,Edith Sitwell,Sylvia Townsend Warner, andDorothy Wellesley.[3] Wellesley[11] and Sitwell[12] receive extensive praise in Yeats's introduction. Wellesley's poetry is given sixteen pages, more thanThomas Hardy (four) orW.H. Auden (five).[13]
Yeats notes in his introduction that he was refused permission to includeRobert Graves,Laura Riding,John Gray, and SirWilliam Watson, and thatRudyard Kipling andEzra Pound were under-represented because of expense.[4] He did not say which of their poems he would have included.
Yeats makes significant edits to some of his selections. He includes a piece of prose byWalter Pater, laying it out with line breaks in order to present it as a poem. He writes that "Only by printing it invers libre can one show its revolutionary importance".[14] He includes a severely edited version ofThe Ballad of Reading Gaol, asserting that having plucked "its foreign feathers it shows a stark realism akin to that of Thomas Hardy, the contrary to all its author deliberately sought. I plucked out even famous lines because, effective in themselves, put into the Ballad they become artificial, trivial, arbitrary".[15]
Critics noted many idiosyncracies in Yeats's editorial choices, such as the exclusion ofWilfred Owen, the editing ofThe Ballad of Reading Gaol, the over-representation of Gogarty, and the exclusion of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land".[3]W.H. Auden called the anthology "the most deplorable volume ever issued" under the imprint of the Clarendon Press.[16]The Spectator wrote that it was neither authoritative not definitive and should have been called "Mr Yeats's Book of Modern Verse".[3]
In a largely critical review of the anthology,Robert Hillyer inThe Atlantic suggested that "The selections and omissions are as capricious as the Introduction". Hillyer wrote that Yeats had over-represented "the school of Eliot, the school of Edith Sitwell, and the school of Pound" because, while he did not like them, he was afraid of them. Hillyer also suggested that Yeats's own poetic convictions were absent: "Forty-five pages of introduction and over four hundred pages of text fail to record the taste or convictions of one of the best of our modern poets, the man who was awarded the Nobel Prize while Thomas Hardy was still living."[5]
TheTimes Literary Supplement, on the other hand, reviewed it favourably, while in Ireland, in reviews for two journals, J.J. Hogan commended Yeats's negative attitude towards modernism.[3]
The anthology became an instant bestseller, selling 15,000 copies in three months, and was reprinted many times.[13]
More recently the anthology has been seen as giving "a sense of what poetry was actually like in the 1920s and 1930s, when modernism was still just one of a number of poetic possibilities".[3] It has been argued that it offers "the same essentially neo-Romantic critique of modernity that can be found in Yeats's own poems" and responds to the modernist poets inspired by Eliot and Pound "with a more idiosyncratic version of what it meant to be modern".[10] It has been compared, both favourably[3] and unfavourably,[13] with theFaber Book of Modern Verse, published the same year.
{{cite book}}:|journal= ignored (help)Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935 at the Internet Archivehttps://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.459263