The fascinating history of poetry anthologies and their influence on British society and culture over the last four centuries.
From the Poems on Affairs of State in the seventeenth century, which opened up the salacious world of the court of Charles II, to Neil Astley's twenty-first century collection Staying Alive, which presented verse as life-affirming therapy, poetry anthologies have intervened in social and political debates, generated conversations about democracy, national identity, morality, class, patriotism and sex.
The Treasuries, by the literary scholar and journalist Clare Bucknell, is the story of the poetry anthology in English, but this is no dry literary study – it is an accessible social history that explores what the poetry anthology tells us about the development of our society and culture across four centuries.
From Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), which prompted some of the earliest arguments about Britain's heritage and what it meant to be British, to the Victorian Golden Treasury of Francis Palgrave – which helped to create and feed a new mass reading public – to The Mersey Sound of the 1960s, in which the Liverpool poets threw down a challenge to mainstream literary culture, The Treasuries reveals the extraordinary amount we can learn about our history by looking back at the anthologies that brought people together and changed the way they thought.
