Contenders

A NEW ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN POETRY (488 pp.)--Selden Rodman -- Modern Library ($1.95).

mr u will not be missed who as an anthologist sold the many on the jew not excluding mr u --E. E. Cummings.

"mr u," thus tinily and cruelly celebrated by Cummings' jingle, is Louis Untermeyer, whose anthologies of modern U.S. and British poetry have sold 199,000 copies since 1919. At least two serious competitors have recently appeared for salesmanship honors in his line of goods.

Selden Rodman's anthology (a Modern Library Giant), first published in 1939 and now issued in a revised edition, has sold 39,000 copies to date (the Modern Library's smaller, cheaper 20th Century American Poetry, edited by Conrad Aiken, has also sold 60,000 since 1927). Less compendious and more personal in his choices than Untermeyer, Rodman has arrayed his poems not chronologically but by categories to show the best points of modernity--from Hardy and Yeats to Dylan Thomas and Robert Lowell. His taste may be quarreled with by the many as it certainly will be by the few, but anyone who wants examples of the best contemporary poets will find most of them in Rodman's book--well printed in large readable type and not multiplied to the point of fatigue.

A New Anthology will have to move fast, however, to keep abreast of Oscar Williams' A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry (Scribner), which appeared last June and has already sold 18,000 copies, quite a trick at the price ($3.50) in a country still supposedly shy of modern verse. Williams' arrangement is by theme, and his choices encompass most of the best poems as well as the best poets. Like "mr u," he includes his own poetry with honest liberality (nine of his to four each for Robert Bridges and Edwin Arlington Robinson).

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