Michael Schmidt (Author, Edited by) Michael Schmidt is a poet, critic, and translator. He edits the leading poetry journal PN Review, is the editorial director of the Carcanet Press and director, the Writing Programme at Manchester Metropolitan University and a Professor of Poetry at the University of Glasgow. He was born in Mexico in 1947, and educated at Harvard and Oxford. His Lives of the Poets, a survey of English poetry from the fourteenth century to the present day, 'distinguished him as among the most vigilant of critics' (The Times).
It is hard to see who could have done the job better than Schmidt * Times Literary Supplement * Schmidt is no despiser of popular taste for all his declared modernism, his agenda is elastic and inclusive... I can imagine teaching out of this rich, warm, generous collection for years, without getting bored, limited, or enraged with its editor * Times Educational Supplement * Michael Schmidt is eminently well-suited to take the measure of the changes and vicissitudes that brought poetry to its current modern character * Independent on Sunday * Readers who delight in the sheer diversity of 20th century poetry in English are richly catered for * Spectator * A valuable and brave book... reliably thoughtful and properly controversial. Furthermore, its devotion is always to poetry, not to personality -- Andrew Motion