Reviews for Scanning the century

The average rating for Scanning the century based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-08-17 00:00:00 HAROLD JOHNSON A wide-ranging anthology of the past century's poetry, including lots of poems in translation. Few of these, I'm sorry to say, work; poetry doesn't lend itself well to translation, even if the translator is himself a poet. However, there are riches enow among the English poetry on display here. The poems are grouped under different subject headings and chronologically under each heading. The subjects are also grouped in rough chronological order. This seems to be a reasonable way to proceed, but it isn't an arrangement that lends itself either to gentle browsing or to easy reference. A titles/first lines index helps enormously in the latter connexion, though the reader is still left to guess, as best he or she can, when a particular poem was written. I, for one, find this quite frustration. All the usual suspects are here, of course. Eliot, the Peradeniya Mafia favourite, has aged badly; in addition to sounding uptight, detached and repressed as he always did, he has acquired a distinct quality of the ridiculous. Auden and Louis MacNiece (whom Porter calls the guiding spirits of the anthology) have aged far better, especially the former. But in poetry, as in humour, it's chacun à son goût, so I'll leave you to find your own favourites.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-08-22 00:00:00 Paula Riley Not enough poetry, lots of events--poems without much poetry in them. Carol Ann Duffy has 5 poems, beat only by WH Auden and Louise MacNeice. These are newspaper articles. And I won't ever read all of it, because reading bad poetry makes me write badly. Two stars because there are a lot of poems and some of them very good; but as an anthology, one star. (A lot of poems, but, again, not enough poetry.)