Poems of freedom

"... I do not think that this anthology will appeal to those who cannot, for example, understand why men are prepared to fight for a principle of international law, or in defence of democracy or social betterment, but not merely to preserve imperial dividends ... The anthology has been arranged in roughly chronological order. It opens with extracts from the Peasants Revolt of 1381 and with passages from that great poem of that period, Piers Plowman ... Reading this anthology will teach no-one how to run a state or raise a revolution ; it will not even, I think, tell them what freedom is. But it is a record of what people in many different social positions ... and in many different Englands ... have noticed and felt about oppression, and so also it is a record of what we still feel. The details of our circumstances of injustice change, so does our knowledge of what is unjust and how best to remedy it, but our feelings change little which is why it is possible still to read poems by those who are now dead ..." -- W. H. Auden p. 8.