But I love old anthologies partly for the light they cast on the flip side of the Ozymandias legend: sure, the king will crumble into dust just like the rest of us, but he still managed to create great works while he lived.
These remind us that the book is a reproduction of a hundred-year-old anthology — and the removal of the original anthology's blank spaces turns the work into a museum piece, discouraging twenty-first-century annotations.
Wilfred Owen has poems that touch on this theme, but I've chosen something less well known that I came across in a 50-year-old anthology – Ewart Alan Mackintosh's "Recruiting", which dissects the jingoistic doublespeak used to persuade young men to go to war.
TV commentators struggled to offer a direct translation, but the two characters, Rei and Wa, taken from the eighth-century work Man'yoshu, the oldest anthology of Japanese poetry, can be read as "fortunate" or "auspicious", and "peace" or "harmony".
And few, if any, writers and directors could accomplish the older anthology task of introducing a whole set of characters and situations, resolving them within the span of an episode, and keeping the whole thing visually and dramatically appealing.
The last thing I did in the theatre was a tour of that old RSC anthology, The Hollow Crown, around Australia and New Zealand.
Yes, it's the same conceit that made "Gatz," Elevator Repair Service's similar gloss on "The Great Gatsby," so memorable, although this time the canonical text is an old "Batman" anthology.
Their paternal grandmother, twinkling into view on their 12th birthday, bequeaths to them a family heirloom, an old storybook anthology whose cover turns out to be a dimensional gateway in the tradition of C. S. Lewis's passage to Narnia.
You can even find its name in the oldest surviving anthology of Japanese poetry.
