'The Document of Our Time'

Among my teachers when I was young was a man I never met. In fact, he had died several years before I enrolled in his school. Oscar Williams, born in Ukraine, died in New York City in 1964. He was a poet but I knew him strictly as an anthologist. Sorry to say, his poems are forgettable. Around 1966 I bought Immortal Poems of the English Language and, a little later, The Pocket Book of Modern Verse and A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry: English and American. That was how I learned the tradition of poetry in English. Anthologies get dismissed but thanks to Williams I read Wyatt and Jonson, Robinson and Auden. I started from zero, knowing nothing, and discovered the writers I loved. I remember falling for Karl Shapiro's war poems. Thanks to Williams, I learned the continuity of poetry in English. A Williams anthology I didn’t read was The War Poets: An Anthology of the War Poetry of the 20th Century (John Day Co., 1945). In his introduction, dated December 31, 1944, Williams writes:…