Oxford Poetry 1947

Unique among Blackwell's editions in having a biographical index, revealing that of the 23 contributors 12 had served as officers in the war, and 2 as sergeants. Showing its mixed blood, so to speak, in being the old Blackwell's-style volume allied with the two OP pamphlets of 1946, this volume bears a heraldic cover device divided as the Oxford University crest on the left and a hand and star of David on the right. Whatever this signified, it did not appear again.

Lord David Cecil, who seldom missed an opportunity to pose as an aesthete, praised the earlier look of OP in terms reminiscent of the celebrated blue lily vase which was the only adornment of Oscar Wilde's undergraduate rooms at Magdalen: "Within its elegant blue and white covers the successive literary fashions lie enshrined, ready for the future historian to examine." (It was for examining and failing the graduate degree of Kingsley Amis, editor two years later, that he was much maligned in the latter's Memoirs.)

Introduction by Lord David Cecil