This is a “new revised edition” reprinted in 1963 so you can get an idea of how long I have had it.

I had never heard of most of these poets, but knew the famous ones, of course – W.B. Yeats, Walter de la Mare, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Lawrence Durrell (whom I had not realized was a poet but knew from his Alexandria Quartet), Kingsley Amis of Lucky Jim fame, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.

Regarding T.S. Eliot, extracts from The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday are included:

From Ash Wednesday:

“ … In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying …
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.”

(I can’t say I understand this.)

And from the chorus of The Family Reunion:

“In an old house there is always listening, and more is heard than is spoken.
And what is spoken remains in the room, waiting for the future to hear it.
And whatever happens began in the past, and presses hard on the future.
The agony in the curtained bedroom whether of birth or of dying,
Gathers in to itself all the voices of the past, and projects them into the future.
… There is nothing at all to be done about it,
There is nothing to do about anything,
And now it is nearly time for the news
We must listen to the weather report
And the international catastrophes.”

I looked in vain for the poems by Walter de la Mare I had learnt by heart at school. I think one of them was “The listeners”:
“’Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door.”
Also,
“Someone came knocking at my wee, small door”.

(He is interested in knocking at doors.)

I also looked to no avail for Sea Fever by John Masefield:

“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and a white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.”

And Home-Thoughts, From Abroad by Robert Browning.
“Oh, to be in England.
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England – now!”

My Dad, who was also my Headmaster and teacher, loved poetry and got us to learn all these poems and more by heart. But, sadly, none were to be found in this anthology.

To return to the present anthology, it contains two poems by Arthur Waley, whom I did not know. These are translations of Chinese poetry.

The chrysanthemums in the Eastern Garden (Po Chü-i A.D. 812)

“The days of my youth left me long ago ( )

I have a feeling my English teacher at A level gave me this, and also "The New Poetry", in 1970. Favourites included here are Harold Monro's "Living" (less well-known than his much-anthologised (but still a favourite) "Overheard on a Saltmarsh"), Robert Graves' "Warning to Children", and Sidney Keyes' "William Wordsworth".

When my friends and I first came across this anthology in the school library, I remember that we had a little giggle at the title: how could it be "contemporary" when the most recent poem had been written in 1948? (some 25 years ago then...). But as soon as we dipped into it we found poems that grabbed our attention, and it's a book I've kept coming back to ever since. I'm very happy that I was able to find an early reprint with the two-colour cover a few years ago, but I had to pay a bit more than the stated 2/6 for it.

Allott's brief was to pick a representative selection of poetry by British writers composed between 1918 and 1948. He cheats a bit on both limitations (he ignores nationality changes for Yeats, Eliot and Auden, for instance), but the rules give him scope to exclude the Georgians (whom he regards as a pointless irrelevance), include a few First World War poems like "Strange meeting", and illustrate the shift in poetic taste from the French-inspired imagist writing of the twenties to the more socially and politically engaged poems of the thirties and forties.

The poets are arranged by date of birth, so the book opens with Yeats and closes with Sidney Keyes, a promising young poet killed in action in 1942. There are a few startling omissions, as you would expect in an anthology (otherwise how could we play "who's in and who's out"?) — Hugh MacDiarmid is perhaps the most glaring, but Allott was not exactly generous in his selection of female poets, either: only Kathleen Raine and Anne Ridler actually got in. Edith Sitwell should have been there too, but Allott had a fight with her about which poems he wanted to include, and they couldn't agree. Stevie Smith is never mentioned - she had published plenty of poems by then, but she only really became fashionable later.

On the "in" side there are a few small surprises - people like Rayner Heppenstall and Laurie Lee whom you wouldn't immediately associate with poetry - and plenty of names that have fallen off the radar. Betjeman is in, although he wasn't all that well-known as a poet yet in 1948 (Allott is spot-on in picking "Death in Leamington"), but some other younger writers who only really came into prominence in the fifties are not (Abse, Alvarez, Larkin, Hughes). Allott has no problem identifying the really big names of his period: Eliot, Yeats, Auden, MacNiece, and Spender all get expanded entries, and Dylan Thomas also gets a bit more space than most of his contemporaries.

Allott seems to be particularly concerned to show us poems that are representative of their times, so his selections often steer clear of the poets' best-known work (but not always: the choice of Yeats includes "Prayer for my daughter" and "Leda and the swan"). Sometimes he picks a piece that seems in hindsight to be super-obvious, but which wasn't necessarily well-known at the time, like Henry Reed's "Naming of parts" (a poem that appeared in just about every classroom anthology in the 60s and 70s, presumably because the editors, and our teachers, all belonged to the National Service generation).

An unusual feature is that every poet gets a short editorial introduction, not just the usual potted bio but a few pithy critical comments about their work as well. Allott doesn't bother with the kid gloves: "Rayner Heppenstall is ... a critic of intelligence with a real sensitivity to words, rarely a satisfactory poet".

Definitely an anthology that should be on everyone's shelf!

(Later editions of the anthology were extended to include poems written up to 1960: I don't have one of those to compare with.) ( )