Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Anthologies have been a powerful force in poetry and criticism in English ever since the earliest extant book of this kind was published in the sixteenth century. A theoretical, historical, and critical inquiry, Anne Ferry's book looks in detail at the assumptions anthologies are predicated on, how they are put together, the treatment of the poems in them, and the effects their presentations have on their readers' experiences of the poems. Part I explains the classifying terms and defining dimensions - conceptual, spatial, temporal - that make the anthology a unique kind of book. Part II asks how the poems most frequently included in anthologies get there: by what cultural situations, literary circumstances, and internal features. Part III describes how poets themselves, as readers and compilers of anthologies, have used them, and how anthologies have contributed to the making of poems and the making of their reception.

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