The Anthology Wars: Modernism to Now

Key Thesis: From the competing modern-"verse" anthologies of 1936 to the corrective collections of the 1980s and 1990s, poetry anthologies have been battlegrounds for cultural authority. Each anthology makes a claim about what poetry should be—and who gets to decide. In the twenty-first century, the anthology's power to consecrate has weakened, but its role as a record of literary conflict has never been more visible.

1936: The Year of Two Anthologies

Nineteen thirty-six saw two anthologies define modern poetry in opposed ways. Michael Roberts's Faber Book of Modern Verse and W. B. Yeats's Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 offered incompatible visions of "modern"—their rivalry inaugurated the anthology war as a literary form.

Roberts's Faber Book was forward-looking and internationalist, including Eliot, Pound, and the Auden generation. But it leaned heavily on the war poets—Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon—whose work confronted the slaughter of 1914–18 with a terrible precision. Roberts argued that modern poetry was defined by a "change of sensibility" driven by the shock of total war. Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" was included not as a tribute but as a demonstration of how the twentieth century had broken the lyric's ancient consolations.

Yeats's Oxford Book was deeply personal, sometimes perverse, and brilliantly provocative. He excluded Wilfred Owen entirely, explaining that "passive suffering is not a theme for poetry." (Owen's mother had refused permission anyway, but Yeats's remark became the lasting scandal.) He gave sixteen pages to Dorothy Wellesley (more than Hardy or Auden), printed Walter Pater's prose with line breaks to look like verse, and doctored poems to suit his taste. Auden called it "the most deplorable volume ever issued" by Oxford University Press.

Yet the book sold fifteen thousand copies in three months. The war between Roberts and Yeats established that an anthology's choices were arguments about the very definition of poetry.

1960 and the American Anthology Wars

The next major battle took place in the United States in 1960. Donald Allen's The New American Poetry 1945–1960 was a manifesto disguised as an anthology, organising poets into rival schools—Black Mountain, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats, the New York School—representing, Allen wrote, "a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse."

Allen was directly challenging the dominant anthology, Hall, Pack, and Simpson's New Poets of England and America (1957), which offered a more conservative, formalist selection: Lowell, Wilbur, Larkin, Gunn. Allen countered with Ginsberg's "Howl," Olson's "Maximus Poems," O'Hara's urban improvisations, and Ashbery's opaque lyrics. Two visions of American poetry, each claiming the mantle of "new," each organised around an anthology that functioned as a tactical weapon.

Allen's book sold over a hundred thousand copies. It shifted the centre of American poetry away from New Critical formalism toward open-field poetics and countercultural energy. Marjorie Perloff called it "the fountainhead of radical American poetics."

Alvarez and the British Intervention

In Britain, A. Alvarez's The New Poetry (1962) attacked the "gentility" of the 1950s literary establishment. His introduction, "Beyond the Gentility Principle," argued for a poetry "fit for the age of the concentration camp"—a poetry of extremity, psychological risk, and emotional exposure.

Alvarez included Americans alongside Britons, scandalising purists. His anthology became a university staple, but promoted a narrow seriousness that later critics saw as a new orthodoxy—excluding quiet poems as reliably as Palgrave had excluded metaphysical ones.

1980s–90s: Corrective Anthologies

If the first wave was about aesthetic allegiance, the second was about representation. The 1980s and 1990s saw an explosion of corrective anthologies designed to recover voices excluded by the male, white, metropolitan tradition.

Key examples include:

Black Sister: Poetry by Black American Women, 1746–1980 (1981), edited by Erlene Stetson.
No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass (1973, expanded 1993), arguing that women's poetry had its own tradition and concerns.
The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Women's Poetry (1987), edited by Fleur Adcock, aiming to "counteract the undervaluation of women's poetry."
Gay & Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (1988), edited by Carl Morse and Joan Larkin.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature itself, which expanded selections to include more women, writers of colour, and postcolonial authors.

These anthologies were the literary arm of the canon wars in universities. Conservatives accused them of lowering standards; editors responded that the standard itself had been built on exclusion. Both sides were right.

The Present: Post-Canon Anthologies?

Today, the anthology faces an identity crisis. Digital archives and social media have displaced its traditional role as gatekeeper. Contemporary anthologies such as The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011), edited by Rita Dove, and African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (2020), edited by Kevin Young, balance representational breadth with aesthetic judgment, but they can no longer claim to define "the canon."

What remains is the anthology's power to frame arguments. Each anthology is a narrative about poetry's past, present, and future. The anthology wars taught us that selection is never innocent. The best anthologies today acknowledge their own partiality, making a case without pretending it is the only one.

Conclusion

The anthology wars show that anthologies have always been more than repositories. They are arguments about value, belonging, and cultural authority. If the modern anthology has lost canonical authority, it has gained the freedom to be provisional and to reflect a literature too diverse for any single book to contain.

Last updated: 2026-07-01