The efforts among dozens of editors to reprint and thus circulate compositions by Black poets in anthologies across the decades constitute an extraordinary ongoing saga in the production of African American literature. Without collections bringing together large groups of Black poets in the pages of individual books, the view of an interconnected Black literary tradition may have been far more difficult to realize. Further, the presence of Black poets in primarily white anthologies diversified the racial and cultural hegemony of those collections and extended the readership of African American writers.

This chapter traces the history and legacy of Furious Flower, conceived as a conference on Black poetry and poetics in 1994 and continuing to this day as an academic and cultural center housed at James Madison University. While such institutionality may find itself, at times, at odds with the most radical parts of the African American poetic tradition, it is nevertheless a fundamental way to establish historically marginalized writing in the literary consciousness of a nation. This chapter examines the shape and the substance of Furious Flower’s dedication to archival recording while also looking at the organization’s attempt to chart a poetic landscape for African American poetry after the Black Arts Movement, in an era that has seen explosive growth in the production of poetic work but, precisely due to that growth, is increasingly hard to describe as a unified “tradition.” The chapter identifies how, through its dedication to audiovisual material, Furious Flower has turned scores of deeply ephemeral events into something that can be experienced across time and space, repeatedly, for the sake of research, teaching, community-building, and history-telling.

Poetry and poethood have long been intertwined with floral imagery starting with the ancient Greek idea of poems as flowers (anthoi), with the anthology (anthologia), the garland (stephanos), and, later the florilegium, being a gathering or collection of poets’ or writers’ finest flowers. Victorian poetry is an efflorescence of such ideas, its book titles frequently designating verse collections by one or more poets as a sheaf, posy, bouquet, nosegay, or as an idyllic garden retreat. Botanical images and metaphors of seeds, flowers, leaves, and shoots regularly occur as markers of the poet’s vocation, especially in prefatory poems and poetic dedications, while the lyric poem is often identified as a flower and a floral gift. Drawing on a large range of poetic examples, this chapter includes discussion of poems by Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, Mark André Raffalovich, Thomas Hardy, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, A. E. Housman, and Michael Field.

In this introduction, we describe the purpose for this book by addressing the question of why we should care about stories. We discuss how stories form "sticky" narratives that readers might more readily remember as they engage in a wide array of resources regarding career searching. We also discuss how the inspiration for this book – Studs Terkel’s Working (1974) – leads us to offer another perspective of work: specifically, the modern experience of starting a new job. We end with an overview of what to expect in the book and how to read it.

This chapter examines what happens when we decolonize the materiality of the nineteenth-century Hispano-American anthology, when we move away from the anthology as a book form with colonial publishers, titles, sections, bylines, and expand it to centralize the (formerly) colonized and their ephemera, that is, Hispano-American editors, readers, and writers as well the Spanish-language newspapers they edited, read, and wrote for. What do these perspectives teach us about the emergence of what we now call a Latinx people and literary tradition? Mirroring the instability of the region following the US–Mexico War and the ontological uncertainty of its readers, newspapers like the Los Angeles-based El Clamor Público represent the formation of a pre-Latinx literary tradition. The newspaper’s editor and proprietor, Francisco P. Ramírez gave expression to what I call a Hispano-American borderlands anthology of poetry before there was a formalized creation of a Latinx poetic tradition in the United States.

Although the first anthology of Mexican poetry dates from 1833, Alejandro Higashi argued in his seminal volume PM-XXI-360 that the primary role of the anthology in Mexico changed in 1966. Traditionally a genre that presents a selection of previous work shaped by a certain notion of taste, the anthology took on an overtly prescriptive role with the first edition of Poesía en movimiento, edited by Octavio Paz, Alí Chumacero, José Emilio Pacheco, and Homero Aridjis. This text has remained in print ever since, and has privileged a practice of “demanding poetry” that has been taken up by later anthologies. The chapter also discusses the “cloning lab” of the anthology and how this phenomenon can be discerned in the profusion of anthologies published since the 1980s.

This chapter traces the transformation of the Persian poetic classics from a living textual corpus into a pantheon of heritage objects for the use of national literary institutions. Its focus is on the creation of national literatures for the Soviet eastern republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan from their establishment until the late Stalin period, but it shows how those literatures coevolved with Iranian and Turkish national canons, and with cosmopolitan and international post-Persianate canons. In its readings of the major classical poets Rudaki, Firdawsi, Khayyam, Nizami, Nava’i, and Bidil in modern anthologies, commentaries, and theatrical adaptations, the chapter emphasizes the asynchronous intervention of the classical poets themselves in their reception. The creation of these national literatures was a successful contestation of the representative authority of Western orientalists by national scholars, writers, and cultural officials, which would be widely imitated by postcolonial state cultural bureaucracies during the Cold War. The chapter’s central episodes are a series of anthologies published in Istanbul and Moscow in the early 1920s for Turcophone readerships; the founding Tajik anthology composed by Sadr al-Din ‘Ayni; the attack on the canon mounted by Central Asian radical folklorist–critics; and the Stalinist jubilees for classical Persianate poets.

Historically condemned for their commercial exploitation of poesy, and threat to authorial autonomy, the literary anthology was nevertheless one of the signal forms of literary modernism, in the US and beyond. It was at once a salient means for circulating and preserving verse and a genre in its own right. Although the little magazine has been the more attractive genre of study – both for the form’s closer proximity to collaborative literary production and for their amenability to digital scholarly methods – the anthology often had a symbiotic relationship to little magazines in the modernist period, and has endured as a form for aesthetic and political self-identification, speculative interpellation, preservation, and reclamation, as well as being a mode of reaching audiences beyond the “field of restricted production.” This chapter traces the US career of the anthology from Des Imagistes to An “Objectivists” Anthology, emphasizing the genre’s key importance for Black American writing.

Collecting and collector culture remain important aspects in the contemporary graphic novel, sustaining a relationship to the past that is tangible in material objects. While the representation of collectors is well known, this chapter charts a somewhat different aspect of collectors and the archives they assemble: it is less interested in graphic novelists as collectors than in their indebtedness to previous collections and the new uses they invent for them. This chapter attends to an earlier moment in the history of comics, one that precisely framed collecting as part of a media-historical conversation and in a context of changing ideas about cultural value, preservation, reproduction, and access, studying its long-term implications for understanding the archival impulse in the graphic novel today.

Chapter 5 looks at passages of carpe diem within longer texts, such as satires of Horace and Juvenal, Petronius’ Satyrica and Vergil’s Georgics. As carpe diem poems are read and re-read, they become independent textual objects: they can be inserted just about anywhere but never lose their lyric splendour. Thus, Vergil applies the carpe diem motif to a context as humble as cattle-breeding, while both Seneca and Samuel Johnson ignore the context and treat this section as vatic wisdom. This chapter analyses how such excerpts relate to Latin satire, which bastardised other texts, to late antique anthologising, medieval florilegia, and early modern commonplace-books. The chapter also proposes a new model for understanding textual allusions and intertexts in classical literature. Finally, the chapter argues that clichés are important features of classical culture that are worthy of close study.

In his chapter on Proverbs, Christopher Ansberry provides a refreshing introductory approach to the book, not least because he starts with the history of interpretation rather than letting thematic concerns dominate. He identifies five patterns within the history of the book’s interpretation, including a focus on character formation, debates about the nature of its ‘wisdom’ and place in the canon, interest in its reception via matters of date and authorship, the discovery of comparative ancient Near Eastern material, and current, expanding interdisciplinary approaches to the book. A section on the fundamental nature of the book takes on matters of form, genre, poetic features, and the idea of a ‘collection’, whilst granting admiration rather than suspicion to the complexities of the book’s sayings. Likewise, the structure of Proverbs, though containing many parts, comes together into a coherent whole, an ‘anthology’, to which each piece contributes. Ansberry concludes by proposing four ‘dominant’ themes in the book: the fear of the Lord; wisdom; moral order and created order; retribution and reward.

This part of the book considers how to study the work of a poet. It uses the poets Emily Brontë and Srinivas Rayaprol as case studies to illustrate how to build up a picture of a poet’s career, how to get to grips with their central interests and their ways of addressing them, and how to develop a response to a writer in the context of the broader critical debate around their work.

This closing section offers a brief reflection on how to start exploring the rich and varied history of poetry in English.