Against oblivion

Using the model of Samuel Johnson's "Lives of the Poets", this series of biographical essays looks at 45 20th-century poets from Hardy to Larkin, taking in Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Lowell, Auden, and Plath along the way. Respresentative poems from each poet are included. Examples of each candidate's verse accompany Hamilton's prose text, so that Against Oblivion can be taken as an informal introduction to twentieth-century poetry, or as a basis for critical dispute, or as a useful and provocative anthology; three books in one.