Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry (Hardcover)

by Peter Forbes (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist
Anthologist Forbes' fat, satisfying volume is constructed on a scheme so simple yet compelling that it is odd no one else thought of it before. The aim is to present the historical currents of the twentieth century as reflected in poems. The presentation is chronological but also topical, with a topical section appearing where the topic first cropped up in time; for instance, sections on civil rights and Vietnam come after the section on the 1960s. Certain sections overlap in time, such as those on Fascism v. Communism, World War II, and the Holocaust. English and American poets predominate, yet plenty of European and former colonies' poets are also represented. The ranges of mood, style, and form are broad, and twentieth-century eclecticism informs many fine poems--for instance, Lennon and McCartney's "A Day in the Life." A chronological list of events and the poems about them makes a unique and intriguing appendix. Library literature departments should tell the history and reference departments about this book, for it is a boon to all three. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews
Editor Forbes divides his anthology into 39 sections, arranged both chronologically and by subject, with such headings as "Omens: 1900-1914," "Strange Fruit: Civil Rights 1930s-1968," and "Workout in Reality Gym: The Eighties & Nineties." In his introduction, Forbes notes that he does not (and could not) include writers from all parts of the globe-instead he focuses upon events that have been global in consequence (such as the world wars, advances in science and technology, and decolonization) and arranges his selections in connection to them. A timeline of events and their corresponding poems is included as an appendix. While over 100 translations appear, the majority of poets represented herein hail from Britain and the US. Forbes nonetheless has done an admirable job of being "inclusive" without pandering to the masses, and we are offered a generous sampling of contemporary British poets with whom most American readers are not likely to be familiar. While better-known poets such as W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice have the most entries (eight apiece), most others are allotted only one work (or excerpt), making it difficult to get a sense of the poets' work beyond what is given. Still, this is not meant to be an anthology of poets, but of poems, some of which have been included because they are topical, not because they are aesthetically important-but inferior poems are the exception here, not the rule.An entertaining anthology of value both artistically and historically. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 640 pages
• Publisher: Penguin UK (June 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670880116
• ISBN-13: 978-0670880119
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,081,376 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Scanning the Century, April 25, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry (Paperback)

Peter Forbes' Scanning the Century meets the editor's objective of capturing 'this century's flavor "with something like the tang of newsreel and the zest of popular song."' Forbes selects from a wide range of contemporary poets, from those standards of the British educational curriculum, such as Auden and Hardy, to poets in translation, who are perhaps unknown to English-speakers, such as Toge Sankichi writing on Hiroshima or Goran Simic on the Yugoslav conflict. Forbes manages to stitch together such British school favourites as 'Naming of Parts' by Henry Reed, with poems by black Glaswegian poet Jackie Kay and by Nigerian Wole Soyinka, successfully scanning the century in terms of time as well as geography.

If I have a problem with this anthology, it is that Forbes meets his objective a touch too well. Whilst poetry can always match 'the zest of a popular song', it sits uneasily in newsreel format. As though he is providing us with tasters, Forbes frequently uses extracts rather than including whole poems. It may be that he had problems with copyright, or that at 596 pages in paperback he didn't have the space to include all the text he would have liked. Nevertheless, in some cases he would have used little more space in including the whole poem. (See, for example, Tony Harrison's four verse extract from 'Long Distance' - the whole poem is only eight stanzas long!) And in other cases, he only makes the slightest of gestures towards a great work. For example, he only includes a few stanzas from 'The Fire Sermon' in the case of Eliot's landmark work, The Waste Land. At the same time, Forbes cuts Eliot's 'Preludes' in half. It would have cost him no more space, would have allowed him to showcase Eliot's achievements in modernism and would have allowed the reader to feel satisfied in one full poem, had he used the whole of `Preludes' and left The Waste Land out. At least then, the reader would have had the satisfaction of reading `Preludes' as Eliot published the work, and wouldn't be wondering what had been omitted from this Reader's Digest version of Eliot's works. If you know the poem, you feel shortchanged by the edited version; if you don't know it, you can't help wondering what it might be like in full. And that means you have to use Scanning the Century as a springboard to other poetry books.

The second difficulty with Forbes' editorial choices is that the glibness of some of his section headings hovers between puncturing poetic pomposity (alliteration accidental) and sending up the subject matter of the poems grouped under those headings. Some of these headings have a distinctly postmodern, tongue-in-cheek flavour, though Forbes dismisses postmodernism with scary ease. He reduces postmodernism to a preoccupation with the nature of reality, then shoves it aside, as a matter for philosophers. Against postmodernism's scepticism with respect to absolute truth, Forbes argues that science and history (if we refrain from interpreting the latter) provide us with indisputable truths, which, he implies, proves the case for sidelining postmodernism! Hmm.

Despite these quibbles, if you are looking for a book to mark the passing of the century, and a means of savouring the flavour of our times, whilst notching up the major events and movements of the past hundred years' history, Scanning the Century will meet your requirements.