Modern British Poetry

Louis Untermeyer dates modern English poetry not to a new century, but to a rupture around 1885, when Victorian ideals began to lose their hold. What might poets make of the world once its old dreams no longer seemed enough?

Published in 1920, this anthology gathers voices from a period of upheaval in British and Irish poetry. Untermeyer’s introduction follows the shift from decorative art and the Celtic revival to Kipling’s machinery, Masefield’s storytelling, and the poets shaped by war. Then the poems take over: Hardy beside Yeats, Housman beside Sassoon, with love, work, memory, landscapes, and battle rendered in sharply different voices. Their forms and subjects keep changing, but the old certainties are never quite restored. What new music emerges when an age’s familiar ideals begin to break apart?

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