Includes index.

The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 is the first major anthology to survey the poetry from Britain and Ireland published in the half-century after the Second World War. This book presents poems of consistent quality and surprise from a period whose immense political, social and scientific changes have altered both poetry and its readership. Wider in its franchise, sometimes less formal in structure and often more attuned to vernacular cultures, here is some of the best poetry written by men and women in the post-war era. Fuelled by Butler's Education Act, by immense technological change and social mobility, and by the increasing position of English as the core language for so many cultural and racial groups, these are the poems of the democratic voice. In their long essay which prefaces this anthology, Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford - both poets and critics in their thirties - describe and explain the excitement and diversity of the poetry of the period. Their choice of poets (which ranges from Edwin Muir, born in 1887, to Kate Clanchy, born in 1965) reflects the changes they describe.