The Harvill Book of 20th Century Poetry in English

In his new anthology Michael Schmidt pays homage to the Modernist project of finding coherence within the chaos of the century. He presents and represents all the seismic shifts and conflicts of a turbulent century, from the modified Romanticism of the Georgians to the tragedy of AIDS in the 1980s, from the rage and resistance of the First World War poets to the drug-induced poetic experiments of the 1960s and 1970s. The retreat of Empire set free a multitude of English poetries, from Australia to India. This work is well represented as are the Irish, Scottish, Welsh and northern-English poets who forced a way into a literature that often seemed to exclude them. Michael Schmidt’s book uathoughtful, balanced and yet not afraid of the controversy that any such work invites uais the definitive and most challenging anthology for the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.