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20th Century Poetry and Poetics
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 was
expanded 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 Patrick
Lane, 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 each
poet's work.
expanded 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 Patrick
Lane, 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 each
poet's work.
725 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 6, 2008
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
Acquired 1980-1
UNB, Fredericton, New Brunswick
February 2, 2013
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.
May 2, 2008
Possibly the best anthology I've ever encountered. Many of my favourite poets were found through reading this cover to cover multiple times.
January 5, 2025
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.
May 15, 2026
this is a canadian college and university-level teaching anthology, which is interesting, actually, because there is so much talk about british poetry and US poetry and it's interesting to have "another country heard from", which in some ways is between the two and in others is quite different. it contains, of course, a lot of british and american poets, but also canadian poets. it also includes a section of concrete poetry at the end - I consider concrete poetry to be an interesting school of poetry - one of those artistic schools that is rather a dead end in itself, but a good influence on others. I say dead end not because there's no use in being a contemporary concrete poet, but it certainly wasn't the future of poetry as a whole. and part of the deal of 20th century poetry was the future of poetry - you can see, especially in the poetics, where poets included in this volume talk about what poetry is and how they craft it, quite a discussion over free verse vs. rhyming, measured forms, and as well a discussion about confessional poetry over less personal, more historical subject matter.
as a poet who writes mostly confessional free-verse, I have a definite stance on the matter. one thing I learned in college was the thrill of criticizing and in some cases dismissing chunks of the work of greats. freud and durkheim were the fathers of their disciplines but we quite happily sat in class, 19 and 20 years old, ripping them to shreds with the leadership of our professors. I guess that's part of what the right hates about "liberal" university education. if you're conservative, you want reverence for and preservation of the past, if you're progressive, you understand that the world moves on and as we scientifically learn more and experientially learn more and look back on history, someone who was great in the 1800s didn't know what we know now. it's not to say their innovation and ideas weren't groundbreaking and crucial to what we know now, but the world moves on. there are a lot of great thinkers in ancient greece not because it was some unspoiled paradise of learning and academia, but because it was long ago, and these were the first times a lot of these things were observed and written down that we still have a record of. and, I mean, I stay humble, because ancient people were making observations about the stars and determining the world is round and here's how you can sail around and find your way, etc. and those aren't things I think I would have come up with on my own, at all, and now we have things like satellite navigation that I just accept but really don't understand the mechanics of, just like I really don't understand the mechanics of a record player or a telephone.
anyway, that is to say a lot of the poets here insisted on form, on stresses and iambs and alla that, which is not my thing in poetry at all. I used to hate being in school and clapping out the stresses or counting out if something was iambic pentameter. I'm horrible at that stuff - and as someone in the poetics pointed out, the rhyme and the meter is leftover from the oral tradition of poetry like a vestigial organ, so hewing to it in the modern day is a bit silly really. there was an attempt by some poets to say ok, so we're leaving this stricture of form behind but if we're going to go on to the natural cadence of human speech, we're going to have to stick closely to rules created by human breath and syllables. eh. I'm a free verse girlie and I'm not going to feel inferior about that.
another thing that gives me the arrogance to dismiss what ts eliot and auden et al have to say about poetry, even though I love some of their poems, is that boy is there a lot of sexism here. I'm sorry, not sorry, but when I see you objectifying women in your work or talking constantly about poets in the masculine and I know that as much as you might know greek and latin and have read extensively in the classics in their original languages, as erudite as you are, as widely and carefully read, you haven't done the work to realize that half the population isn't some other species, isn't lesser than. you're trying to convey great truths about the world, but you've got this enormous blind spot. we can say the same for the whiteness of this volume, now you're talking about even more than half the world. and sylvia plath has long been my favorite poet, but more than one of her poems is besmirched with just unnecessary bigotry - I'm looking at you, ariel, with some absolutely gorgeous language, and then the n-word stuck in there for no good reason, or her casual mining of the holocaust for metaphors in daddy and lady lazarus. she could have done better.
so I don't feel bad in disagreeing with great poets, and particularly as the poetics show - and presumably were selected to show - that they disagree with each other. a lot of them write with complete self-assurance that they know THE way to write poetry, but their way is completely opposed to the next guy's way. so you have ts eliot, talking about how you have got to subsume the self and the personality, you've got to learn all the great writers of the past and continue a dialogue with them. "the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." and just before eliot's essays, you had ee cummings talking about how essential it is for a poet to be "nobody-but-yourself" and to express that self in words. then you have charles olson, who I wouldn't consider as famous as eliot or cummings, going on and on, often shouting in all caps about the FIELD and the OBJECTS, and defining the way forward for poetry in two halves: "the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE/the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE". honestly he's hard to make heads or tails of. he's obviously very passionate about what he's saying but all his yelling doesn't get it across any more clearly. he in fact seems to be more daring and experimental in his prose than in his poetry, saying unintelligible things like, "what we have suffered from, is manuscript, press, the removal of verse from its producer and reproducer, the voice, a removal the poem, and, if allowed in, must be so juxtaposed, apposed, set in, that it does not, for an instant, sap the going energy of the content towards its form."
so, I've said a lot about the poetics section, which is maybe a quarter of the book. the anthology itself was less interesting, frankly. it's chronological by first publication date of their first volume of poetry, with the concrete poets stuck together at the end. so we have yeats, ezra pound, william carlos williams, robert frost, robert graves, eliot, wilfred owen, ee cummings, wallace stevens, auden, dylan thomas, a.m. klein, roethke, earle birney, alfred purdy, lowell, larkin, irving layton, richard wilbur, charles olson, john berryman, robert creeley, thomas gunn, lawrence ferlinghetti (by now I'm like jesus christ this is all men!!) leonard cohen (a nice addition), allen ginsberg, ted hughes, gary snyder, margaret avison (finally a woman, though I detested her poetry), sylvia plath (she actually had single poems accepted for publication before ted hughes and his manuscript was probably accepted first due to her diligence in typing it up and sending it out, so it's a bit galling to have her three poets after him), margaret atwood, then the concrete poems. sylvia plath is the only one of the three women to have a contribution to the poetics, and it is an interview, so it's not just her holding forth as many of the men were.
so overall, I found it an extremely tediously male anthology (because, you know, it's not just oh, these are all men. as a woman, you're constantly seeing women in the poetry either completely ignored or sexualized, or just used as symbols for nature or the muse, so it's not just a matter of oh, this isn't fair representation by the numbers, it's having to have offensive portrayals of your gender thrown at you). I wasn't knocked out by the poems that were selected for each poet either, so the anthology section wasn't fantastic. the poetics section was very interesting as far as the different views the 20th century poets had on the form and direction poetry should take. there wasn't commentary by the editor (gary geddes) to bring out this discussion created by juxtaposing the different essays and interviews; presumably this is the professor's job when teaching the text.
I'm glad I read it, I took notes from it, but in the end I still feel affirmed in my own style and view of poetry, and I won't be keeping this on my shelf. I did enjoy the poetics section - it's interesting to see poets talk about their poetry and what they think poetry is in general and where I differ and agree. more anthologies would do well to include some poetics alongside the poems.
as a poet who writes mostly confessional free-verse, I have a definite stance on the matter. one thing I learned in college was the thrill of criticizing and in some cases dismissing chunks of the work of greats. freud and durkheim were the fathers of their disciplines but we quite happily sat in class, 19 and 20 years old, ripping them to shreds with the leadership of our professors. I guess that's part of what the right hates about "liberal" university education. if you're conservative, you want reverence for and preservation of the past, if you're progressive, you understand that the world moves on and as we scientifically learn more and experientially learn more and look back on history, someone who was great in the 1800s didn't know what we know now. it's not to say their innovation and ideas weren't groundbreaking and crucial to what we know now, but the world moves on. there are a lot of great thinkers in ancient greece not because it was some unspoiled paradise of learning and academia, but because it was long ago, and these were the first times a lot of these things were observed and written down that we still have a record of. and, I mean, I stay humble, because ancient people were making observations about the stars and determining the world is round and here's how you can sail around and find your way, etc. and those aren't things I think I would have come up with on my own, at all, and now we have things like satellite navigation that I just accept but really don't understand the mechanics of, just like I really don't understand the mechanics of a record player or a telephone.
anyway, that is to say a lot of the poets here insisted on form, on stresses and iambs and alla that, which is not my thing in poetry at all. I used to hate being in school and clapping out the stresses or counting out if something was iambic pentameter. I'm horrible at that stuff - and as someone in the poetics pointed out, the rhyme and the meter is leftover from the oral tradition of poetry like a vestigial organ, so hewing to it in the modern day is a bit silly really. there was an attempt by some poets to say ok, so we're leaving this stricture of form behind but if we're going to go on to the natural cadence of human speech, we're going to have to stick closely to rules created by human breath and syllables. eh. I'm a free verse girlie and I'm not going to feel inferior about that.
another thing that gives me the arrogance to dismiss what ts eliot and auden et al have to say about poetry, even though I love some of their poems, is that boy is there a lot of sexism here. I'm sorry, not sorry, but when I see you objectifying women in your work or talking constantly about poets in the masculine and I know that as much as you might know greek and latin and have read extensively in the classics in their original languages, as erudite as you are, as widely and carefully read, you haven't done the work to realize that half the population isn't some other species, isn't lesser than. you're trying to convey great truths about the world, but you've got this enormous blind spot. we can say the same for the whiteness of this volume, now you're talking about even more than half the world. and sylvia plath has long been my favorite poet, but more than one of her poems is besmirched with just unnecessary bigotry - I'm looking at you, ariel, with some absolutely gorgeous language, and then the n-word stuck in there for no good reason, or her casual mining of the holocaust for metaphors in daddy and lady lazarus. she could have done better.
so I don't feel bad in disagreeing with great poets, and particularly as the poetics show - and presumably were selected to show - that they disagree with each other. a lot of them write with complete self-assurance that they know THE way to write poetry, but their way is completely opposed to the next guy's way. so you have ts eliot, talking about how you have got to subsume the self and the personality, you've got to learn all the great writers of the past and continue a dialogue with them. "the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." and just before eliot's essays, you had ee cummings talking about how essential it is for a poet to be "nobody-but-yourself" and to express that self in words. then you have charles olson, who I wouldn't consider as famous as eliot or cummings, going on and on, often shouting in all caps about the FIELD and the OBJECTS, and defining the way forward for poetry in two halves: "the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE/the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE". honestly he's hard to make heads or tails of. he's obviously very passionate about what he's saying but all his yelling doesn't get it across any more clearly. he in fact seems to be more daring and experimental in his prose than in his poetry, saying unintelligible things like, "what we have suffered from, is manuscript, press, the removal of verse from its producer and reproducer, the voice, a removal the poem, and, if allowed in, must be so juxtaposed, apposed, set in, that it does not, for an instant, sap the going energy of the content towards its form."
so, I've said a lot about the poetics section, which is maybe a quarter of the book. the anthology itself was less interesting, frankly. it's chronological by first publication date of their first volume of poetry, with the concrete poets stuck together at the end. so we have yeats, ezra pound, william carlos williams, robert frost, robert graves, eliot, wilfred owen, ee cummings, wallace stevens, auden, dylan thomas, a.m. klein, roethke, earle birney, alfred purdy, lowell, larkin, irving layton, richard wilbur, charles olson, john berryman, robert creeley, thomas gunn, lawrence ferlinghetti (by now I'm like jesus christ this is all men!!) leonard cohen (a nice addition), allen ginsberg, ted hughes, gary snyder, margaret avison (finally a woman, though I detested her poetry), sylvia plath (she actually had single poems accepted for publication before ted hughes and his manuscript was probably accepted first due to her diligence in typing it up and sending it out, so it's a bit galling to have her three poets after him), margaret atwood, then the concrete poems. sylvia plath is the only one of the three women to have a contribution to the poetics, and it is an interview, so it's not just her holding forth as many of the men were.
so overall, I found it an extremely tediously male anthology (because, you know, it's not just oh, these are all men. as a woman, you're constantly seeing women in the poetry either completely ignored or sexualized, or just used as symbols for nature or the muse, so it's not just a matter of oh, this isn't fair representation by the numbers, it's having to have offensive portrayals of your gender thrown at you). I wasn't knocked out by the poems that were selected for each poet either, so the anthology section wasn't fantastic. the poetics section was very interesting as far as the different views the 20th century poets had on the form and direction poetry should take. there wasn't commentary by the editor (gary geddes) to bring out this discussion created by juxtaposing the different essays and interviews; presumably this is the professor's job when teaching the text.
I'm glad I read it, I took notes from it, but in the end I still feel affirmed in my own style and view of poetry, and I won't be keeping this on my shelf. I did enjoy the poetics section - it's interesting to see poets talk about their poetry and what they think poetry is in general and where I differ and agree. more anthologies would do well to include some poetics alongside the poems.
September 24, 2023
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.
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.
April 24, 2011
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.
This is an excellent introduction to the world of 20th Century poetry and poetics. It is not only complete, but precise.
July 20, 2008
I really like this anthology. The selections that are included are very good and reflect the 20th century well. It's a good anthology.
September 27, 2009
The best.... never never fails to pick me up
January 29, 2013
Contains a pretty good variety of poets with great Canadian content. Also introduced me to bpNichol's Continental Trance, so it's a keeper.
April 17, 2022
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.
July 11, 2011
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.
July 11, 2011
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.
August 10, 2014
A college-taught anthology with Leonard Cohen, concrete poetry, and a cover like this?:
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