This authoritative anthology charts the transformative decades of British and Irish verse from eighteen eighty-five to nineteen twenty. The collection opens with an editorial overview dividing the period into seven distinct movements, beginning with the decay of Victorian convention and the rise of decorative aestheticism led by Oscar Wilde and the writers of the yellow book. It proceeds through the muscular affirmations of William Ernest Henley, the Celtic revival spearheaded by William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge, and the ascendency of mechanism in art championed by Rudyard Kipling. A major turning point is marked by John Masefield, who restored rhymed narrative and a potent mixture of beauty and brutality to poetry, paving the way for the Georgian poets and the harsh, unsparing realities of war verse by writers such as Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke.
Throughout the volume, the work of foundational poets like Thomas Hardy, Robert Bridges, A. E. Housman, and Francis Thompson is presented with detailed biographical and critical introductions. The collection explores how poets reacted against Victorian platitudes by turning either toward precious artifice or toward the raw materials of ordinary speech and common life. The development of distinct regional voices, particularly from Ireland, adds a rich layer of national consciousness and folk tradition to the overarching narrative.
The volume balances traditional lyricism with radical departures in form and subject matter, capturing the shifting moods of an empire in transition. While earlier decades sought refuge in medieval dream-worlds or refined aesthetic cults, later writers embraced the industrial city, the worker, and eventually the cataclysmic experience of the First World War. The anthology concludes by contrasting these rich, historically grounded English developments with the more experimental and uncoordinated currents of contemporary American verse.
