Publisher's Synopsis
Agenda, one of the longest-lived and most distinctive 'little magazines' of the last four decades, was established in 1959 by the young William Cookson in response to asuggestion from Ezra Pound. Cookson combines a commitment to contemporary work with special issues reappraising the crucial figures in his Modernist firmament: Pound, MacDiarmid, David Jones. He has kept an attentive eye on the classics, and on the Moderns in languages other than English -- notably Cocteau, Mandelshtam and Ungaretti.
Many major poets choose to publish in Agenda despite its modest circulation and small fees: it allows writers freedom and confers, by its imprimatur, legitimacy on the new. For Cookson the legacy of Modernism is vital; it has not been displaced by reaction or the post-modern but remains a challenge, in the present. Among distinguished poets of our time we find Geoffrey Hill, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Seamus Heaney, R.S. Thomas and Tom Scott prominent in Agenda's pages.
This anthology, first published in 1994 and now available in paperback, is divided into antecedents, modern poetry, criticism, memoirs and the polemics which give it its timeless authority, as though it was a lineal descendant of Criterion and the legendary Calendar of Modern Letters.
