The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical EditionVol. 6: The War Years, 1940-1946

Preface to The Little Book of Modern Verse, ed. Anne Ridler

London: Faber & Faber, 1942. Pp. 160; Preface, 5-9.

The number and variety of anthologies of modern verse is considerable enough to justify a prefatory note to explain what kind of anthology this is. Its most obvious and (I believe) its singular characteristic is its small size. In a more comprehensive collection on a similar plan, such as The Faber Book of Modern Verse, the beginner may find himself bewildered among the multitude of poets: with reference to such books the present volume may be regarded as a kind of primer, an introduction to anthologies. ² But it resembles the collection mentioned, and differs from some others, in that it is not limited to any one group or line of descent. The editor has performed a task of some difficulty, in selecting representative poems by those whom she considers representative poets of the several literary generations which may be classed together under her title. Within the narrow limits imposed by a “little” book of verse, she has endeavoured, not to find a place for every distinguished name – which would be impossible – but to provide an illustration of the various styles of poetry which are generally acknowledged to be “modern.”

The justice of including, in such a selection of modern poetry, poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Victorian, and by William Butler Yeats, older by fourteen years than the eldest of the poets on the list, is now pretty generally accepted, and needs no present defence. It need only be recalled that Hopkins’s inclusion is due to two causes, neither of which would have operated alone: the first, that his poetry has only been accessible for some twenty-three years; the second, the originality of metric and language which sets him apart from his contemporaries. Had his work been available and recognised at the time of its composition, some of his influence would probably have been spent upon an elder generation of poets, and would not have come with full force upon men young enough to be his grandsons. Yeats, on the other hand, who was already recognised as a considerable poet by the end of the last century, owes his place to that very unusual power of development which has made him the contemporary, in turn, of three literary generations. His influence only grew stronger with the years; and it is notably his poetry since 1919 that has made a difference to younger writers.

Apart from these two great poets, we may take as within the term of “modern poetry” the work of those writers who had arrived at individual form and idiom during the four or five years immediately preceding the last war. Those who first found their speech during that war – whether we call them “war poets” or not – form a second age group; and since 1918 at least two other poetic generations can be distinguished. One thing that must strike the reader of the verse of the last twenty years is the rapidity with which one literary generation has followed another; and as each poet has continued to develop his own style, the impression may well be confusing. For this acceleration of change, the poets themselves are hardly to be blamed or praised: the cause lies much deeper than the conscious aims of individual writers, and is to be found, if at all, in the history of a changing and bewildered world, the mutations of which have given it a different appearance to poets no more than ten years apart in age.

Among so much variety, people are still found to ask, and to give an answer to, the question: what is it that makes modern poetry modern? Those who think that they can define modern poetry, are more often found among its detractors than among its admirers – for while it is easy to attribute a common quality to everything we like, it is still easier to attribute a common vice to what repels us. If we like the work of...