Anthology Encyclopedia
Structured reference entries for notable poetry anthologies — editors, contents, history, and significance.
Palgrave's Golden Treasury
Palgrave's Golden Treasury (1861) is the most influential English-language poetry anthology ever published. Edited by Francis Turner Palgrave with advice from Alfred, Lord Tennyson…
The Norton Anthology of Poetry
The Norton Anthology of Poetry is the standard academic anthology for university English and literature courses worldwide. First published in 1970, it provides comprehensive chrono…
Tottel's Miscellany
Tottel's Miscellany (1557), formally titled 'Songes and Sonettes,' is the first printed English poetry anthology. Compiled and published by the London printer Richard Tottel, it in…
The Oxford Book of English Verse
The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1900 (1900), edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch, is a landmark anthology of 883 poems by 233 poets spanning six and a half centuries of English p…
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), edited by Bishop Thomas Percy, is a three-volume collection of traditional ballads, songs, and metrical romances that reignited English i…
Lyrical Ballads
Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (1798), by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is widely regarded as the founding text of English Romanticism. Its 1800 second e…
The New American Poetry
The New American Poetry 1945–1960 (1960), edited by Donald Allen, is a groundbreaking anthology that introduced the Beat Generation, Black Mountain poets, the New York School, and …
Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times
Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times (2002), edited by Neil Astley for Bloodaxe Books, is an international anthology of 500 life-affirming poems organized into 12 thematic se…
Immortal Poems of the English Language
Immortal Poems of the English Language (1952), edited by Oscar Williams, is a mass-market anthology of 447 British and American poems by 150 poets spanning roughly 600 years. Price…
The Rattle Bag
The Rattle Bag (1982), co-edited by poets Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, is an anthology of over 400 poems arranged alphabetically by title rather than chronologically or by author.…
Poems That Make Grown Men Cry
Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (2014), edited by father and son Anthony and Ben Holden, gathers poems selected by 100 notable men — writers, actors, scientists, and public figures —…
The Best American Poetry Series
The Best American Poetry is an annual anthology series founded by David Lehman in 1988, in which a different guest editor each year selects 75 poems published in American magazines…
The Waste Land and Modernist Poetry Anthologies
T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) is the single most influential poem of literary modernism, and its publication year coincided with a wave of anthologies — including Conrad Aike…
Emily Dickinson's Posthumous Collections
Emily Dickinson's posthumous collections — Poems (1890), a second series (1891), and a third series (1896) — were edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson from ro…
The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women
The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985), edited by feminist scholars Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, was compiled explicitly to correct the historical underrepresenta…
The Man'yōshū and Anthology Traditions
The Man'yōshū ('Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves'), compiled in Japan around 759 CE, is the oldest surviving poetry anthology in continuous use anywhere in the world — predating T…
The Oxford Book of American Poetry
The Oxford Book of American Poetry has been substantially reinvented three times since its original 1950 edition by F. O. Matthiessen: Richard Ellmann's 1976 revision and David Leh…
The Faber Book of Modern Verse
The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936), edited by Michael Roberts, was the first anthology to canonize modernist poetry in Britain, championing T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden,…
An Anthology of American Negro Literature
An Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929), edited by Marxist literary critic V. F. Calverton for the Modern Library series, was an early landmark of Black American literary …
The New Negro: An Interpretation
The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), edited by Alain Locke, is the defining anthology of the Harlem Renaissance, collecting poetry by Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude Mc…
The New Poetry
The New Poetry (1962), edited by poet and critic Al Alvarez for Penguin Books, was famous for its combative introduction attacking the 'gentility principle' in British poetry and c…
Contemporary American Poetry
Contemporary American Poetry (1962), edited by Donald Hall for Penguin Books, became the dominant academic anthology for postwar American poetry courses in the United Kingdom and N…
The Penguin Book of English Verse
The Penguin Book of English Verse (2004), edited by scholar and publisher Paul Keegan, is a 1,296-page anthology of over 700 poems spanning seven centuries of English verse, organi…
The Book of American Negro Poetry
The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), edited by James Weldon Johnson, was the first major anthology of African American poetry published in the United States, collecting work f…