INTRODUCTION: THE USES OF ANTHOLOGIES

In the early twentieth century, poetry anthologies (like virtually every class of print artefact) were an overproduced commodity. To offer one snapshot, English publishers released twenty-nine anthologies in the lead-up to Christmas 1927, ranging from Thomas Moult's annual survey of recent verse to topical anthologies such as Cambridge's Poetry Book for Boys and Girls, Longman's Songs of Deliverance and Oxford's Victorian Narrative Verse. Book reviewers who were writing about anthologies, and anthologists who were introducing their own books, seldom failed to make the apologetic gesture of acknowledging the oversupply of anthologies before discussing why the particular volume at hand might be of interest. Introducing his Twentieth Century Poetry, Harold Monro noted the earlier success of the Georgian anthologies (published by his Poetry Bookshop), which spawned imitators, ‘culminating in a natural fatigue’. Erstwhile Georgian poet Robert Graves and his partner Laura Riding went so far as to issue A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, wherein they identified a small number of relatively rare types of anthologies they favoured before denouncing the more common ‘publisher's trade anthology’ as a ‘grotesque form’, a ‘mere wanton re-arrangement of poetry that has its proper place elsewhere’, a ‘second-hand clothes shop of poetry’ that turns poetry into ‘an industrial packet-commodity’.

Paradoxically, this rhetorical setting, in which launching (or praising) a new anthology required apology, coexisted with a material context in which anthologies were popular among readers and useful in many ways to poets, editors and publishers. As Barbara Korte argues, anthologies respond to the basic human and social needs for ‘evaluation, discrimination, and structure’ – needs ‘aggravated by an exploded universe of texts’. With the emergence, in the late eighteenth century, of a print culture large and diverse enough to require advice and mediation, Korte writes, the anthology became ‘an eminently useful form of publication’ (23).