Elegant Extracts

Leah Price

• The Oxford Book of English Verse edited by Christopher Ricks
  Oxford, 690 pp, £25.00, October 1999, ISBN 0 19 214182 1
• The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume One edited by M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt
  Norton, 2974 pp, £22.50, December 1999, ISBN 0 393 97487 1
• The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume Two edited by M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt
  Norton, 2963 pp, £22.50, February 2000, ISBN 0 393 97491 X
• The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume One edited by David Damrosch
  Longman, 2963 pp, US $53.00, July 1999, ISBN 0 321 01173 2
• The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume Two edited by David Damrosch
  Longman, 2982 pp, US $53.00, July 1999, ISBN 0 321 01174 0
• Night & Horses & The Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature edited by Robert Irwin
  Allen Lane, 480 pp, £25.00, September 1999, ISBN 0 7139 9153 4
• News that Stays News: The 20th Century in Poems edited by Simon Rae
  Faber, 189 pp, £9.99, October 1999, ISBN 0 571 20060 5
• Time’s Tidings: Greeting the 21st Century by Carol Ann Duffy
  Anvil, 157 pp, £7.95, November 1999, ISBN 0 85646 313 2
• Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the 20th Century in Poetry edited by Peter Forbes
  Penguin, 640 pp, £12.99, February 1999, ISBN 0 14 058899 X

Anthologies attract good haters. In the 1790s, the reformer Hannah More blamed their editors for the decay of morals: to let people assume that you had read the entire work from which an anthology piece was excerpted, she warned girls, was no better than lying outright. In the 1840s, less predictably, Engels took time out from The Condition of the Working Class in England to sneer at the anthologies littering the sofa tables of the Manchester bourgeosie. In the 1980s, the American poet David Antin charged that ‘anthologies are to poets as the zoo is to animals.’ More recently, Marjorie Perloff called for undergraduates to swear off Evian, in the hope that tap-water drinkers could afford unabridged books rather than hackneyed fragments.