In the Dark

I recently acquired – at negligible expense – the above second-hand copy of the anthology Nine Modern Poets. I got a copy because this book was one we we studied when I was at school back in the 1970s. The First Edition was published way back in 1966, and it was reprinted until the mid-1980s but has long been superseded as a school poetry text by other anthologies. It has been out of print for many years so I had to find a second-hand copy via the internet. I bought some other second-hand anthologies too, which I may share in due course.

Anyway, the Nine Modern Poets are: W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, T.S Eliot, John Betjeman, W.H. Auden, R.S. Thomas, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, and Ted Hughes. Yes, they are all male.

Looking back it’s surprising to see John Betjeman in there, I’d have swapped him for Sylvia Plath (though her first collection, Colossus was only published in 1960 and the second, Ariel, in 1965 so these might have been too late), but the reason I look back on this book with some fondness, indeed nostalgia, is that it was this collection that introduced me to the poetry of R.S. Thomas, and I am very grateful to it for that.

This entry was posted on April 5, 2023 at 9:52 am and is filed under Biographical, Education, Literature with tags Dylan Thomas, E.L. Black, John Betjeman, Nine Modern Poets, Philip Larkin, Poetry, R.S. Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, Wilfred Owen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.