Yeats begins his long introduction by saying that he has tried to include "all good poets who have lived or died from three years before the death of
Tennyson to the present moment". Implicitly the field is English-language poetry of Great Britain (which Yeats refers to throughout as "England") and Ireland, though notably a few Indian poets are included. Other than
T. S. Eliot and
Ezra Pound, American poets are specifically excluded. including
Oliver St. John Gogarty and
Shri Purohit Swami, as well as
Margot Ruddock, with whom he was having a relationship. Gogarty is represented by seventeen poems, more than anybody else and three more than Yeats himself. He is also given a prominent position in the centre of the volume and praised in the introduction as "one of the great lyric poets of our age". In all, the volume includes 97 writers and 379 poems. Of these, sixteen are Irish. Ten are women, with strong representation of those of the 1920s and 1930s, such as
Frances Cornford,
Vita Sackville-West,
Edith Sitwell,
Sylvia Townsend Warner and
Dorothy Wellesley. Wellesley and Sitwell receive extensive praise in Yeats's introduction. Wellesley's poetry is given sixteen pages, more than
Thomas Hardy (four) or
W. H. Auden (five). Yeats notes in his introduction that he was refused permission to include
Robert Graves,
Laura Riding,
John Gray, and Sir
William Watson, and that
Rudyard Kipling and
Ezra Pound were under-represented because of expense. He did not say which of their poems he would have included. Yeats makes significant edits to some of his selections. He includes a piece of prose by
Walter Pater, laying it out with line breaks in order to present it as a poem. He writes that "Only by printing it in
vers libre can one show its revolutionary importance". He includes a severely edited version of
The Ballad of Reading Gaol, asserting that having plucked "its foreign feathers it shows a stark realism akin to that of Thomas Hardy, the contrary to all its author deliberately sought. I plucked out even famous lines because, effective in themselves, put into the Ballad they become artificial, trivial, arbitrary". ==Reception==