Complete poems are bulky and too heavy to carry around. Collected poems pretend to be complete, but usually are not. Selected poems are altogether unpretentious and reader-friendly. But they can be problematic.
Who decides what poems are important for inclusion in a volume of selected poems? When the selection occurs during the author’s lifetime, may one assume that the author was involved? What motivates the choice of one poem over another? How do readers’ preferences influence this choice? How do new readers and familiar readers of a poet negotiate the poems that are left out of the selection?
The essays in this volume address these questions in a variety of ways, and also provide an overview of poetic writing from modernist poets to the present day, using selections from the 1940s until now. They offer new insight into the uses, both pedagogical and critical, of selection. Because Selected Poems usually address a large general public, these essays have also been written for all those who wish to know more about how these slimmer, more attractive volumes are produced.
