Critical Editions is a series intended to bring literary texts closer to students of both postgraduate and undergraduate levels. This anthology of modern British poetry includes representative poems by the important poets of the canon and helps introduce the reader to the sheer exuberance and variety of this period in British poetry. The detailed introduction offers a survey of the main themes, styles and poets.  The commentaries accompanying each poem will enable students to unravel the more obscure references and contextual implications of the poem in question.  The edition includes a select bibliography in the area to enable further reading and research.

Mohan Ramanan is Professor of English at the University of Hyderabad. A senior academician, he is the author of several books including books on modern poetry from Britain, America and India. His doctoral study on the Movement poets was later published as The Movement . He went on to publish Difficult Balance, a study of contemporary American formal verse and edited a book on contemporary Indian English verse.

Preface vii
Acknowledgements viii
Note to Teachers and Learners ix

Introduction
The Precursors
Ezra Pound
The ‘English’ Strain: The Hardy Line
The Modernists: The Fascination of a Past with ‘Unified Sensibility’
Organic Society and Organic Poetry
Thomas Stearns Eliot
William Butler Yeats
The Thirties
Poets of the Forties
The Movement Poets
The Sixties and Seventies
The Eighties
Contemporary Verse

Select Bibliography
1. Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
The Darkling Thrush
The Convergence of the Twain
The Voice

2. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)
God’s Grandeur
The Windhover
Thou art Indeed Just, Lord, if I Contend

3. William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
The Wild Swans at Coole
Easter 1916
The Second Coming
A Prayer for My Daughter
Sailing to Byzantium
The Circus Animals’ Desertion

4. Walter de la Mare (1873–1956)
The Listeners
Thomas Hardy

5. Edward Thomas (1878–1917) 60
The Owl
October
The Gypsy

6. Ezra Pound (1885–1972) 64
A Pact
In a Station of the Metro

7. David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930)
Last Lesson of the Afternoon
Snake
Bavarian Gentians

8. Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965)
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Waste Land

9. Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Strange Meeting
Futility

10. Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–73)
The Letter
Our Hunting Fathers
In Memory of W. B. Yeats

11. Dylan Thomas (1914–53)
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

12. Philip Larkin (1922–85)
Church Going

13. Ted Hughes (1930–98)
The Horses

14. Seamus Heaney (1939– )
Death of a Naturalist

15. Craig Raine (1944– )
A Martian Sends a Postcard Home