Volume 20, Number 6 · April 19, 1973
Darling, They're Quoting Our Poem
By Denis Donoghue
The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature: Volume 4, 1900-1950
edited by I.R. Willison
Cambridge University Press, 1,414 pp., $49.50
The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1950
chosen and edited by Helen Gardner
Oxford University Press, 974 pp., $10.00
The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse
chosen by Philip Larkin
Oxford University Press, 641 pp., $12.50
I want to consider the process by which poems, plays, and fictions, written presumably according to unofficial precepts, become, in a few supremely blessed instances, 'Literature'; that is, endorsed as the standard tropes of a period, an age. Or, to put it more specifically, the process by which some few of the thousands of poems in print find themselves authenticated, invited to appear in anthologies. By what bells have these authors, these poems, been summoned?
Review, 4087 words
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