Anthologies and Orthodoxies

Abstract

This discussion is a "work-in-progress" one, based on six recent anthologies, details of which are provided in the accompanying list. The complete project—a critical survey of anthologies of Australian poetry since 1950—originates from 1982, when I was visiting, in Canada and in Europe, foreign choirs and places where they sing Australian literature. I was frequently asked to recommend "a good anthology", apparently in the confident expectation that there was in existence some definitive, canonical cultural repository of preservation and classification (since that double function is surely what we expect anthologies to perform).