Palgrave's Golden Treasury: From Shakespeare to the Present, updated by John Press (OUP, £8.99 in UK)

Surprisingly, it seems that there has been no new edition of Francis Palgrave's anthology for 30 years

Surprisingly, it seems that there has been no new edition of Francis Palgrave's anthology for 30 years. Ezra Pound once in a moment of exasperation expressed the wish that Palgrave, for the sake of the development of English poetry, had been strangled in his cradle; certainly the vast sales and popularity of his book (1861) proved a dubious legacy and set up barriers in public taste for the poets of the 20th century to knock down or leap over. There is too little of the Elizabethans and the Metaphysical poets, too much of the early 19th century (Campell, Moore, Scott, Lamb), but then Palgrave was thinking of his own age and not for posterity. The anthology has been constantly updated, and this edition takes it a stage further, but the choice of recent verse is so inbred and uninspiring that you almost wish the original had been left to stand alone as a mid Victorian period piece.