Now that the succeeding century is well advanced into its first decade, it seems a good time to take a purchase and a perspective on the poetry of the twentieth century. This Companion offers an availably intelligible and stimulating account of the current state of its critical reception, of the issues and challenges to which it gives rise in our own cultural and social climate, and of the various engagements between poetic form and history which it offers as both problems and examples to succeeding poets and readers.

The poetry treated here is 'English' in the sense that it's written in the English language, or versions of it, by poets who are, or were, of English, Scottish or Welsh origin, or have an origin or family attachment overseas but have been resident in Britain or taken British nationality. The place of nation in the construction of personal and poetic identity is itself an issue in some of this work; and the fact that the latter part of the century witnessed a form of the devolution of political power to Scotland and Wales has found effects and emphases in some of the poetry discussed here, and not only poetry from Scotland and Wales.

The Irish story, which of course intersects with these stories at numerous points, is not told here, mainly on the practical grounds that, a separate story too, it is already the subject of Cambridge Companions: one on W. B. Yeats edited by Marjorie Howes, and one entitled Contemporary Irish Poetry edited by Matthew Campbell. Even so, Yeats, although he has no essay to himself in this book, is a towering presence within it. Discussions of his place include the elaborately artful self-revisions of his lengthy career, notably those encouraged by Ezra Pound (whose more general place in this story is outlined in several essays in this volume too); his formidable technical expertise and refusal of modernist experimentation; his establishing of the poetic sequence as a highly influential modern form; and the enduring challenge of W. H. Auden's response to him, particularly in his elegy 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats', published in 1939, which is cited and discussed several times.