DE ANTIANTHOLOGIST V

Wantrouw elke dichter die zich voordoet als cultuurdrager in de gedaante van een op kwaliteit selecterende en hiërarchisch ordenende poëziebloemlezer.

Wantrouw elke cultuurdrager in de gedaante van een op kwaliteit selecterende en hiërarchisch ordenende poëziebloemlezer die ook zichzelf dichter noemt.

DE ANTIANTHOLOGIST IV

"The anthology meets with two different kinds of reactions in living poets. They will write either toward the anthology or away from it. Anti-anthology poets often overreach themselves, inflicting self-protective distortions on their work - as parents in old Central Europe often deliberately maimed their sons to save them from compulsory military service. But the problem of remaining outside the anthology system should be to the poet no other than the problem of writing as it is best for him to write."

Laura Riding & Robert Graves, 1928

DE ANTIANTHOLOGIST III

"The financial history of these 'Best Poems of...' anthologies - which as a matter of fact are only commercially successful in the sense that they pay the publisher better than volumes by individual authors - is interesting: though no contributors are invited to pay their fee for inclusion, to become 'co-publishers' at six dollars a page, not many are given any fee other than their presentation-copy. There are, however, a few 'names' which must be secured in order to give the collection an air of respectability. Each 'name' is paid for according to the owner's awareness of its exact market-value."

Laura Riding & Robert Graves, 1928

DE ANTIANTHOLOGIST II

"The reader whose first approach to poetry is through anthologies usually acquires the anthology habit for life; he cannot distinguish poets from each other by what may be called the handwriting quality in their poems. It hardly occurs to him that there is such a quality, or that it is worth discovering by reading poetry in its original setting." - Laura Riding & Robert Graves, 1928

DE ANTIANTHOLOGIST I

"The intelligent but unread reader who wishes to find out what poets he would like to know better gets no help from the popular anthology: in an anthology everything reads democratically much the same. We would not go so far as to say that every poem in The Golden Treasury is uncharacteristic of the author, but we do say that even positive poems lose character by being anthologized. Poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley, Keats, become affected by the same negative poison, to a point where they are almost unrecognizable; so faces in the underground or overhead railways are made negative, as faces, by the spell of the cheap ticket which is the only link between them. In place of their original quality the good poems acquire the same meaningless competitive vulgarity as the bad. (...) It is doubtful whether even the 'masterpieces' can weather the effects of being anthologized." - Laura Riding & Robert Graves, 1928