The purpose of The Broadview Anthology of Poetry is to present a wide range of poetry written in English. [Though the poems are arranged chronologically], we have compiled not a historical survey, but rather a collection of poems that represent a variety of times, places and English-speaking cultures. Our selection process was guided by a wish to combine works long accepted as part of the English-language 'canon' with material not always well represented in anthologies-such as, most notably, the poetry of women since the seventeenth century...

"Another notion implicit in the framing of this anthology is that English-language poetry has dramatically expanded within the last century. Writers in Australia and New Zealand, Canada, India, Africa and the Caribbean all hold in common with writers in Britain and the United States an English-Language tradition that helped to shape their history and their institutions, and that laid the groundwork for new writings...

"In trying to include as wide a selection as possible of representative work...we have had to leave out several well-known long poems. In almost all cases, however, we have chosen to represent a poet by several poems, inviting readers to take a broader view of a given writer's work and ways of thinking." - from the Preface