In October 1922, W. H. Davies, by then a highly regarded Georgian poet, edited an anthology of contemporary verse – the only time he put his hand to such a venture. Shorter Lyrics of the Twentieth Century was launched in the same month as the first issue of T. S. Eliot's magazine The Criterion, which contained a rather long poem, ‘The Waste Land’. The latter, it is scarcely necessary to point out, is still a seminal text, and the magazine in which it appeared was influential far beyond the 17 years it existed. Davies's Shorter Lyrics– for all the book's virtuosity and charm – has receded into obscurity.

However, at the time of its publication, the decidedly unmodernist Shorter Lyrics might well have been expected to achieve the same sort of acclaim as the five volumes of Georgian Poetry edited by Edward Marsh between 1912 and 1922. (Walter de la Mare claimed he had made more money out of Georgian Poetry royalties than the whole of the rest of his verse publications.) The first Georgian Poetryanthology sold 15,000 copies, the second 19,000, the third 16,000, the fourth 15,000. The fifth, however, sold a relatively paltry 8,000. As Marsh himself observed, the volumes of Georgian Poetry ‘went up like a rocket’ but came down ‘like a stick’. It was the end of one literary era, the start of another.

The impact of Shorter Lyricswas destined to be small compared to Georgian Poetry. Nonetheless, Davies set about its production optimistically. In a spirited and mischievous preface, he states that a really good anthology ‘must hold surprises’ – and so it does. The contents are diverse (Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Anna Wickham, James Joyce, H. D., Charles Sorley, A. Huxley, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, John Masefield, Frances Cornford, Muriel Stuart, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, G. K. Chesterton, Neil Munro and Charlotte Mew, to name just a few). Of the 117 poets included, approximately one-sixth is female. That may not seem many by today's standards perhaps, but it was bold at that time. Only two of the five Georgian Poetry volumes included women, and in each case only one.