In my third year of three years at the Society of Fellows, I had to look for a job. Here I had been on six years of fellowships in a row with nothing to do, and it was of course insulting that I had to do something to get... to get a salary, but I knew it would be in teaching, and I knew by that point that I did not have to go to graduate school. I could do it because of my book. And there had been another book just after the book of poems... I edited an anthology, called the New Poets of England and America. Because I'd just come from Oxford, I knew everybody in England very well, and it was... I was necessary for the... for that portion of the book. It was... the book started when one poet had an idea, and sold it to a publisher, and then brought in a second poet, and then the second poet brought in me... I was the third one coming in. It was Robert Pack, Louis Simpson, and me, who were doing this, and we met from time to time, we read everything, we found things and gave them to the others to read, and then we would vote, unanimous sometimes, sometimes two out of three. And it came out in '57, and it did not have a single... a single Beat Poet in it, so it always became known as the academic anthology - the anthology of the academic poets. And the subsequent volume by Donald Allen was the Beat anthology. And when we were... we weren't reading and rejecting the Beat Poets - we didn't know about them - and it's true that there was for a while, the battle of the anthologies - it's been called that - the battle of the anthologies, where people would take sides and, you know, all the stuffy people would defend us, and all the more interesting people would defend the Beat Poets, and so on. It was very annoying, but we had not read any of the work of Allen Ginsberg or Gregory Corso, and so on, and if we had read it, we probably would have disliked it, I should say. It attacked our citadel. We were metrical. We were following in the... free verse modern poetry was free verse... but then in the late '20s and '30s with John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, WH Auden, poetry was swinging back into metrical forms again, and there was some of it which was very good and very beautiful, and we were picking that up. Very few of us were writing free verse - that's not the only difference obviously between these schools, but we printed... oh, we printed Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes, and Philip Larkin, and Geoffrey Hill, and many others from England, and we printed very many good American poets - the best. It was at the time that WD Snodgrass really first came to attention, because it was before the publication of Heart's Needle, and it... it helped a lot of poets get going, and it was good. But there were many bad poets in the volume who looked good to us at the time, and that will always happen with any contemporary anthology. It was great fun to do, and I enjoyed the process of editing and promoting the people who I thought were good. I had already been doing it, earlier, by editing for The Paris Review.
