‘Posterity is so dainty,’ complained the American essayist John Jay Chapman, ‘that it lives on nothing but choice morsels.’ Chapman was writing about Browning, whose work for his contemporaries meant life, not art. But, Chapman predicts, ‘Posterity will want only art’. It is a nice distinction when considering our penchant for anthologies. This daintiness goes all the way back to the first anthology, Meleager’s in ancient Greece, as the word itself means ‘flower gathering’, or simply a ‘garland’ or ‘bouquet’. We pick poems like flowers and arrange them in a book. The suggestion, of course, is that certain kinds of poems tend to get left out in favour of those that work best as stand-alone ornaments, giving us an unnatural notion of what’s actually out there growing in the fields.