ABSTRACT
It is probably unfair and anachronistic to blame Robin Skelton’s otherwise excellent and useful 1964 anthology for reproducing the antifeminist received wisdom of New Verse. Ignorance of women’s poetry is, after all, a feature of all the currently available histories of the 1930s, even the most recent. Thus, Adrian Caesar’s recent history of thirties poetry defends its inclusion of ‘very few women poets’ (i.e. none except Kathleen Raine) on the grounds of ‘the infrequency with which their work was published and discussed in the major literary periodicals. The literary world of the 1930s was male-dominated, and this study reflects the fact without wishing to condone it’.5 It is a pity, however, that Skelton also accepted the notion that the thirties poet must be young as well as male. The exclusion of poets born before 1904 means that his apparently comprehensive selection of political poetry omits Hugh MacDiarmid’s First and Second ‘Hymns to Lenin’ and ‘The Seamless Web’, Edgell Rickword’s satire ‘To The Wife of a Non-Interventionist Statesman’, and all of Jack Lindsay’s poems; while on the Right, it leaves out Wyndham Lewis’ satire ‘One Way Song,’ (1933) and Roy Campbell’s pro-Franco ‘Flowering Rifle’ (1939). The anthology lacks also Nancy Cunard, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Naomi Mitchison, who were all born before 1900; also Kathleen Raine, Stevie Smith and E.J.Scovell, who did fit the age criterion.
