Volume 40, Number 12 · June 24, 1993
Night Mail
By John Bayley
Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness
edited and with an introduction by Carolyn Forché
Norton, 812 pp., $35.00
This is a remarkable book. Not only in itself and for the poems it contains, but for the ideas that lie behind their selection as an anthology. Poetry has been called 'memorable speech': a definition quoted by the young W. H. Auden in his preface to an anthology he helped to edit in the Twenties called The Poet's Tongue. And if the speech of poetry is memorable, in a way that ordinary speech is not, should what the poem is saying not be memorable too?
Review, 3237 words
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