The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture

Description

The fascinating history of poetry anthologies and their influence on British society and culture over the last four centuries. From the Poems on Affairs of State in the seventeenth century, which opened up the salacious world of the court of Charles II, to Neil Astley's twenty-first century collection Staying Alive, which presented verse as life-affirming therapy, poetry anthologies have intervened in social and political debates, generated conversations about democracy, national identity, morality, class, patriotism and sex. The Treasuries, by the literary scholar and journalist Clare Bucknell, is the story of the poetry anthology in English, but this is no dry literary study - it is an accessible social history that explores what the poetry anthology tells us about the development of our society and culture across four centuries. From Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), which prompted some of the earliest arguments about Britain's heritage and what it meant to be British, to the Victorian Golden Treasury of Francis Palgrave - which helped to create and feed a new mass reading public - to The Mersey Sound of the 1960s, in which the Liverpool poets threw down a challenge to mainstream literary culture, The Treasuries reveals the extraordinary amount we can learn about our history by looking back at the anthologies that brought people together and changed the way they thought.

Dr Clare Bucknell received her doctorate in eighteenth-century literature and intellectual history from Oxford University in 2014. She is an expert on the history of poetry and a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, covering everything from Jonathan Swift to Instagram poetry. Clare currently lives in the Hague.

Anthologies are the sleepers of the bookshelf, loaded with the hidden ideals and prejudices of their compilers. Clare Bucknell reads expertly between their lines to reveal a remarkable alternative history of literature. -- Rosemary Hill The delight of this book is its expert toggling of scale. Bucknell dissects large issues - politics, class, taste, education - via small vignettes: Palgrave collecting his poems with scissors, war poems falling like bombs, poetry on prescription. Her panoramic history throws up unexpected parallels - the Exclusion Crisis and the Spanish Civil War, Keats and working men's eduction, ballads and pop. Treasuries is smart and learned but unpatronising: it sparkles with appreciation for the anthologist and their always-partial act of selection. -- Emma Smith * author of Portable Magic * Impressive in its coverage of social history, teeming with anecdotes, The Treasuries arrives just as Britain is once more rearranging its literary heritage and 'retelling favourite stories about itself at a moment of national crisis'. -- Peter Conrad Clare Bucknell is a compelling storyteller as well as a deep and cheerful scholar. A riveting read, The Treasuries changes how a reader approaches the designing and sometimes devious anthologists and the books they sell us. -- Michael Schmidt This book is a wonderful celebration and examination of anthologies as the cornerstone of our literary culture. -- Ian McMillan