A collection of poetry representing a wide-range of writers and styles

From Tottel's Miscellany (1557) to the last twentieth-century Oxford Book of English Verse (1999), anthologies have been a prime institution for the preservation and mediation of poetry. The importance of anthologies for creating and re-creating the canon of English poetry, for introducing ‘new' programmes of poetry, as a record of changing poetic fashions, audience tastes and reading practices, or as a profitable literary commodity has often been asserted. Despite its impact, however, the poetry anthology in itself has attracted surprisingly little critical interest in Britain or elsewhere in the English-speaking world. This volume is the first publication to explore the largely unmapped field of poetry anthologies in Britain. Essays written from a wide range of perspectives in literary and cultural studies, and the point of view of poets, editors, publishers and cultural institutions, aim to do justice to the typological, functional and historical variety with which this form of publication has manifested itself - from early modern print culture to the postmodern age of the world wide web.

This set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

In this, the first sustained feminist analysis of Yeats, Elizabeth Butler Cullingford resituates his love poems in their cultural and historical context. Yeats himself said that when he started to write verse, "no matter how I begin, it becomes love poetry." Cullingford argues that the politics of sexuality are at the heart of his creative enterprise. From the early lyrics prompted by his frustrated love for Maud Gonne through later works such as "Leda and the Swan," "Among School Children," and the Crazy Jane sequence, she traces the complex intersections between history, aesthetics, and desire. Cullingford shows how women's demand for emancipation brought pressure to bear on the conventions of love poetry, which idealize woman as an aesthetic object; and how Yeats's revision of these formal conventions modifies his idea of the Irish nation, which has traditionally been represented as female. Yeats described himself as "a man of my time, through my poetical faculty living its history": his love poetry bears the impress of the shifting balance of sexual power and the struggle to define a postcolonial Irish identity.