Which Flowers to Choose? Robert Graves and the Dilemmas of Anthologising

This essay investigates examples of how Robert Graves’s poetry has been popularly anthologised, within a broader examination of the history and idea of the poetry anthology. It draws out key issues involved in the anthology as a form, considers the role that anthologies play both in the ongoing reception of a poet’s work and the cultural life of poetry at large, and proposes principles on which the practice of anthologising may be freshly conceived and developed.