This Companion is both an alphabetically arranged reference work and, in its sum, a history, a map of modern poetry in English. From the last decade of the century, it offers a survey of the terrain, from 1900 to the present, and from Britain and America to New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, Trinidad, Zimbabwe - anywhere, if fact, where poets write in English. It charts the shift from `poetry' to `poetries' - from primarily British and American traditions to a rich diversity of younger poetic identities elsewhere. The only comprehensive work of its kind, it covers not just individuals - some 1,500 of them - but also magazines, movements, concepts, and critical terms.

Edited and introduced by Ian Hamilton, himself a notable poet, The Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English has the distinction of including among its contributors many other celebrated poet-critics, often in intriguing author/subject combinations. Encounter, for example, Seamus Heaney writing on Robert Lowell, Dan Jacobson on Thomas Hardy, Jon Stallworthy on Rupert Brooke, Carol Rumens on Edith Sitwell, Andrew Motion on Edward Thomas, and Anne Stevenson on Sylvia Plath. These and other writers offer lively and opinionated critical assessments as well as biographical and bibliographical information. And, as one soon discovers, twentieth-century poets have lived far from humdrum lives. Twenty-seven here had nervous breakdowns, nineteen served time in jail, fourteen died in battle, three were murdered, one executed. One played hockey for his country. There were fifteen suicides, and one poet who staged his own death only to reappear, still writing poetry, under a new name.