Everything is positive, everything is good. Omni-tolerance reigns, bar some dark asides about America. What seems to have been forgotten though, is that Yeats declared himself a democrat in politics, but not in art. As a rule of thumb, four or five poems were selected from each of the poets who seemed to us particularly important in the period, with the hope that these selections would provide a spine for the anthology. So that's that disposed of.
Poetry is no longer, never was in fact, the new rock and roll.
On Budget Day, in the parliament of democratic voices, nothing is being left to chance. I doubt it. And so on. There is little evidence of it in the poems included here, and some evidence to the contrary. For example Keith Douglas, surely Britain's finest war poet of those years, is nowhere to be seen in these pages, while Michael Longley and Ted Hughes have important and valuable poems pointing, instead, to the trauma of the First World War.