Agenda: An Anthology : The First Four Decades (1959-1993)

Agenda, one of the longest-lived and most distinctive 'little magazines', was founded in 1959 by the young William Cookson, as a result of meeting Ezra Pound the previous year. This anthology presents a broad-ranging selection of the many arresting and important contributions which have appeared in Agenda. The book is divided into: antecedents, contemporary poetry, criticism, memoirs, and polemics. Among the many major poets who choose to publish in Agenda despite its modest circulation we find Geoffrey Hill, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney and Tom Scott.Other items of major importance in the anthology are David Jones's long poem 'The Sleeping Lord' which the poet completed for the first David Jones issue (1967), two uncollected drafts of Pound's Cantos, T.S. Eliot's 'Scylla and Charybdis', a lecture that first appeared in the T.S. Eliot issue (1985).Cookson combines a commitment to contemporary work with special numbers reappraising crucial figures in his Modernist firmament: Pound, Bunting, David Jones, Zukofsky. He has kept an attentive eye on the classics, and on the Moderns in languages other than English - notably Cocteau, Mandelshtam and Ungaretti. For Cookson the legacy of Modernism is vital; it has not been displaced by reaction or the post-modern but remains an enabling challenge, in the present.