'The World's Contracted Thrush'

I was round at my girlfriend's the other night, and this title jumped out at me from her bookshelves. The book's subtitle was 'Major Poets from Chaucer to Plath'.
Checking it out, it didn't take me long to realise that this was a school anthology, and, with the exception of the Australian A. D. Hope, the anthology was a predictable enough run-through of the standard luminaries of English poetry. (Georgina grew up in Melbourne – Hi, lover!)
Browsing through it set me thinking that there are two different approaches to putting together a poetry anthology, and that I have a decided preference for one over the other.
There are those that argue for a canon: they choose a number of poets and offer a representative selection of their work. ‘The New Poetry’ anthologies do this, both Alvarez’s original 1962 anthology, and Bloodaxe’s 1993 collection with the same title - all very worthy I am sure, but too prone to becoming a vehicle for their editor’s cleverness or pejudice. The book I was holding couldn’t even be accused of that, being no more than a schoolmaster’s dry-as-chalk-dust splutter from a very old and rusty cannon…
Whereas the other kind of anthology favours poems rather than poets, and they proffer delight rather than peddle reputations.
To this category belong ‘Emergency Kit’ and those wonderful selections by Heaney and Hughes, ‘The Rattle Bag’ and ‘The School Bag’, as well as that Victorian stalwart, Palgrave, which was my constant walking companion when I was younger. Neil Astley's much-lambasted, though to my mind, irreplaceable pair of anthologies, 'Staying Alive' and 'Being Alive' are also books I could – and have – survvived on as my sole reading-material for weeks on end (I’ll never forget reading ‘Staying Alive’ on a houseboat on the Nile, and out under the stars of the Sahara…)
As for 'The World's Contracted Thrush: major poets from Chaucer to Plath', I thought that was rather unkind to Sylvia - hey, can guys still get lynched for a quip like that? You can call me a saucy pedantic wretch, if you will… - but on closer inspection I realised I'd misread the title: it was 'The World's Contracted Thus'. But then again, the world would be a duller, saner place without a few misreadings…