Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture by Clare Bucknell review

This is a dazzling book — the more so because it is its author’s first. Clare Bucknell, a literary scholar who writes for serious periodicals such as The London Review of Books, has studied the influence on British society of poetry anthologies, from the early compendiums of the 17th century to modern treasuries that frame poetry as a way to soothe 21st-century stress. Her argument is that anthologies (the treasuries of her title) constitute our culture. That is, they are the essence of what we “habitually think and feel”.

Arguably, Bucknell’s early chapters should have been omitted on this reckoning. Her first, for example, is devoted to the four-volume Poems on Affairs of State, which started publication in the 1690s, and targets the goings-on