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Poetry Please Eman Poet Lib #09 (Everyman Poetry)

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This is a collection of truly popular poetry: It contains the poems most people wanted to listen to when the BBC asked them to make suggestions for a programme of poetry readings. Not surprisingly the listeners preferred melodic rhymes and accessible contents. There is some light verse, but poems about the English countryside vastly outnumber it. I was surprised that even towards the end of the 20th century poems such as Rupert Brooke's "Grantchester" or Edward Thomas' "Adlestrop" are the ones English people love best. At the end of the day the collection tells us quite a lot about the way cultured English people saw the world, their country and themeselves in the 1980s. It may be frustrating for most contemporary poets, but the people seem to prefer sentimental ballads to anything even remotely daring - it is as if Ezra Pound and his followers had never lived.

P.S. Charles Causley wrote the introduction to the book and contributed one of the poems (a fairly sentimental ballad, as it happens), but this is NOT A COLLECTION OF CAUSLEY'S POETRY!