20th-Century Poetry & Poetics

by Gary Geddes

20th Century Poetry and Poetics is considered the most important teaching anthology published in Canada for poetry courses at the college and university market. The greatly anticipated fourth edition of the anthology was published in the Spring of 1996 and the number of poets included wasexpanded by more than fifty per cent. The twenty-five poets new to this edition - - twelve women and thirteen men - are from Canada, the UK, the United States, and the Commonwealth.The list of new poets include Nobel Prize winner Dereck Walcott; well-known American poets Sharon Olds, Louise Gluck, Denise Levertov, Galway Kinnell, Robert Hass, Robert Bly, John Ashbery, Philip Levine, and Rita Dove; Irish poet Eavan Boland; Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy; and Canadians PatrickLane, Sharon Thesen, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Don McKay, Daphne Marlatt, Gary Geddes, Bronwen Wallace, Robert Kroetsch, Lorna Crozier, Tim Lilburn, Roo Borson, and bpNichol.The book provides in-depth selections from the work of each poet, and where possible, places the poems in the significant context of the poets' own views on poetics. In addition, there are useful biographies and comments on the poets in the form of headnotes that appear at the beginning of eachpoet's work.

Genres: Poetry, Reference, Anthologies, Nonfiction, Textbooks, History, Canada

649 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me, this book is different from other anthologies of modern poetry in two ways. First, in addition to the usual suspects (T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti), it includes work by Canadian poets like A.M. Klein, Earle Birney, Alfred Purdy, Margaret Avison, Margaret Atwood and BP Nichol. Second, at the end of the book are essays in which the poets discuss their “poetics”: their theories of poetry and their methods of working. I have had my copy for years and it has held up very well (although now I have second thoughts about the under-linings and marginal notes I added when I was much younger and reading these poets for the first time).

Acquired 1980-1
UNB, Fredericton, New Brunswick

[Sally Ito · Rating 4 out of 5]

I use this as an anthology and resource for my creative writing (poetry) classes and find reading it rewarding each time I teach the class. There's something about the wide selection and the section on poetics in the back that's like an inspiring pottage of poetic sustenance. Read Levertov's poetry last night, and her piece on 'organic form,' and felt engaged and moved by what she had written. Same goes for Frost, as well.

[Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly the best anthology I've ever encountered. Many of my favourite poets were found through reading this cover to cover multiple times.

[māris šteinbergs · Rating 3 out of 5]

the anthology in itself is good, it does it's job. namely - gives an overview, in my opinion, the most famous poems from the writers, not necessarily the best ones. also - it's deadly embarrassing for the Canadian poets to be alongside any of the greats.

[Christopher Nilssen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was assigned this text for an advanced poetry workshop as part of my undergraduate degree in creative writing. I remember it angered me greatly that the list price was over a hundred dollars, there was no digital copy available, and that for the first time since returning to university in 2016 I’d have to acquire a physical copy of a book. I was only just beginning to rekindle an appreciation for physical books at this time, and it hadn’t quite taken hold, but really—it was the cost that was fueling my rage.

I ended up snagging a used and only slightly dog-eared copy from a textbook reseller for under thirty dollars, and over the course of the semester I may have referred to its contents a handful of times. I passed the class with an A+ and slid like a lizard into my summer vacation.

I usually read poetry on the toilet. I’ve said this elsewhere: poetry is the perfect medium for potty time. For the most part, poems are short enough to get a few in during the worst of bowel movements, and not the sort of thing that keeps you glued to the seat to the point of developing deep vein thrombosis—unlike, say, a mobile phone. I’ve been a subscriber to POETRY magazine since June of ’22, and every year they do a double issue in July, which means no August issue. I was stuck without poetry in the latrine until I remembered Geddes’s book.

This is not a lightweight read. At nine-hundred and thirty-five pages, it qualifies as a tome. It covers the work of fifty-nine poets, from Yeats to Atwood. Each poet’s work is prefaced with interesting biographies that can lead to other readings; I read at least five other books off the back of this one. A section on poetics closes the book, with a selection of interviews and excerpts from books detailing the thought and process behind the poems.

It took fifty-two days to read. I read all the poems aloud, and this gave me a deep appreciation for the breath, line, and structure. I have a clear idea in my head of how to read poetry now, whereas prior to this I felt as though I was just winging it. There are many cases where a poet has chosen line breaks and structure that make sense only to them, and to hear them read their work is enough to make you wonder why they even bother with a structure at all. To me, all the punctuation and carriage returns should inform the reader on how I meant for the poem to be read. And I believe that poetry is meant to be read aloud. It is dead on the page. It is dead in the mind of the reader. It’s not until it’s verbally evoked through speech that life is, quite actually, breathed into the work.

I understand this is a subject of great debate. Now you know where I stand.

Something that struck me while I was working my way through the book was how Geddes had chosen to put the lifespan of the poet next to their names as headings for each section, i.e., William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). As the book was published in ’96, it got me wondering how many of the then-living poets were now deceased. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and after I finished reading, I assembled an Excel spreadsheet entitled “Dead Poet’s Society” and figured out how many had passed. Twenty. The average age was seventy-two. A full twenty, living and dead, were/are over eighty-two years old. Poets who aren’t driven completely over the edge tend to live a long time.

I also developed a new habit during this read: highlighting. For many, this is an elementary study technique, but it’s one that I’ve never employed throughout my academic career. I never wanted to deface a textbook, particularly one that I would be later selling back to the school. But about halfway through 20th-Century I decided I should highlight the poems that resonated with me. At some point in the future, I will have to give the first half the same treatment, but for now here are the ones that stood out to me:

T.S. Eliot's Burnt Norton
Margaret Avison's The Swimmer’s Moment
Sylvia Plath's Lady Lazarus
Leonard Cohen's You have the lovers
Gwendolyn MacEwen's Dark Pines Under Water and You Can Study It If You Want
Robert Bly's The Dead Seal
Philip Levine's Starlight and A Theory of Prosody
Margaret Atwood's Notes Toward a Poem That Can Never Be Written
Patrick Lane's Fathers and Sons
bpNichol's continental trance
Louise Glück's Mock Orange
Robert Hass's A Story About the Body
Lorna Crozier's The Child Who Walks Backwards; Fathers, Uncles, Old Friends of The Family, and Last Testaments
Tim Lilburn's Pumpkins

I found the poetics section unusually engaging. Unusual in that I personally don’t like talking about process very much but reading about how these big names in 20th century poetry worked was fascinating. I particularly enjoyed the ones who said they had no idea how any of it came together, and glanced sidelong at the ones who believed they had something figured out.

And that’s another interesting thing that struck me after reading this book: I’m a child of the 20th century and yet I wouldn’t call any of these poets contemporaries. When she died, Gwendolyn MacEwen was as old as I was when I started this academic study of creative writing (forty-six) but the still-living ones are of my parent’s generation. Poets of my generation are likely slinging their verses on Instagram, Medium, or Patreon. Whoever they are, if I’ve read them in POETRY they’ve not stood out to me, and they’ve certainly never come up in any of the classes I’ve taken over the past two years. The period of artwork that Geddes captures in his book represents a fading Polaroid of a time when print mattered more, and these poets all knew each other by close degrees and were part of actual movements. If any of that is going on today, I am woefully ignorant of it, but from what I’ve read of William Carlos Williams’s autobiography I might not be missing much.

[uh8myzen · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my absolute favorite anthologies. Not only does have the usual giants, but also some of my favorite Canadian poets and some excellent criticism and poetics at the end. Some of those essays are still my favorites, even after the twenty years since I first read them.

This is an excellent introduction to the world of 20th Century poetry and poetics. It is not only complete, but precise.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really like this anthology. The selections that are included are very good and reflect the 20th century well. It's a good anthology.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best.... never never fails to pick me up

[Eileen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contains a pretty good variety of poets with great Canadian content. Also introduced me to bpNichol's Continental Trance, so it's a keeper.

[John Xavier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Judging literary anthologies is a unique challenge because, on the one hand, they might contain some of the best writing ever written but, on the other, they're competing with all the other anthologies out there. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry this is not. And, while there are several excellent Canadian poets included here, giving as much space to some minor regional poet as T. S. Eliot or Sylvia Plath betrays a certain self-serving parochialism. Also, I didn't find the section on poetics all that interesting despite there being a few pleasant surprises. Overall, this is a nice book to have but not an essential one.

[Rudolfo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have the 2nd edition, published in 1973 and a few others. There are now 5 versions/editions and they're all different. Each later edition retains some of the previous one and I believe leaves some out.

[Rudolfo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have the 2nd edition, published in 1973 and a few others. There are now 5 versions/editions and they're all different. Each later edition retains some of the previous one and I believe leaves some out.

[Carolyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A college-taught anthology with Leonard Cohen, concrete poetry, and a cover like this?:



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