The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 is a poetry anthology edited and introduced by W. B. Yeats and published in 1936 by Oxford University Press.
Contents
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. W. H. Auden called the anthology "the most deplorable volume ever issued" under the imprint of the Clarendon Press. The Spectator wrote that it was neither authoritative not definitive and should have been called "Mr Yeats's Book of Modern Verse".
The Times Literary Supplement, on the other hand, reviewed it favourably, while in Ireland, in reviews for two journals, J. J. Hogan commended Yeats's negative attitude towards modernism.
More recently the anthology has been seen as giving "a sense of what poetry was actually like in the 1920s and 1930s, when modernism was still just one of a number of poetic possibilities".