The late 1960s and the early 1970s were a time of anthologies. Some anthologies appeared as part of a series, and most were introducing the Anglophone reader to the “new”. This might have meant a dead poet who had been, till then, unavailable in English, or a living poet whose work was deemed to be of importance. The dead and living were joined in these publications through the immediacy of that wayward period we were still living through: the 20th century. We knew the 20th century was an extraordinary time not only for its incredible “progress”, the leaps it had made, but also for its tragedies, disruptions and cultural freedoms and enthusiasms: it’s almost as if we weren’t inhabiting it but spectating on it. Our everyday life was banal; but our period was surely unusual in a way that exceeded what our fathers in their jobs could comprehend. For this reason – the innate superiority of the here and now – the old encyclopaedic selections of revered passages, the Golden Treasuries, became redundant. It was, instead, a radical strangeness we were being offered, the quality that Pound must have had in mind – and not just recentness – when advocating...

Read more