For many years, I have taught in the Department of English at New York University a course called “Modern British and American Poetry.” “Modern” is deemed to mean, approximately, Whitman and after. “British” is deemed for administrative purposes, but for no other purpose in my hearing, to include W. B. Yeats and any other modern Irish poet who wrote or writes in English. I doubt that anyone would protest if I stretched the word “British” to include the Santa Lucian Derek Walcott and the Australian A. D. Hope.

When I first offered this course, many years ago, I divided it into two approximately chronological parts. The first part ran from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) to Eliot’s Waste Land (1922). The other poets I read here were Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. The second part started with Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930) and ended with John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror(1974). Here, the other poets I read were Marianne Moore, John Crowe Ransom, William Empson, W. H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop. I brought the course to an end with Ashbery’s poem because I felt that any more recent choices I would make would be somewhat arbitrary and polemical. If I chose Ashbery, why not J. V. Cunningham, A. R. Ammons, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, Charles Olson, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Anthony Hecht, Allen Ginsberg,