“This bum is the property of the Education department. Parents are asked to cooperate in seeing that the bum is kept clean and in good repair.”

You can almost hear the gleeful sniggers with which an unknown pupil at Grange Academy in Ayr neatly and repeatedly replaced the word “book” with “bum” in a poetry textbook in the 1970s. The defaced book, Here Today, is one of dozens of anthologies used by GCSE students over the decades that have been collected by former teacher Julie Blake, some of which are now on display at Cambridge University library.

According to Blake, who is studying school poetry anthologies for a PhD, this defacement may have been carried out by a pupil called Morag Nisbet, who is marked as the owner of the book in 1975.

“It’s such an immediate springboard back in time to a classroom in Ayr, and thousands of others besides,” Blake says, “a child interacting with a book in a playful, good-humoured, harmless way, handing on that humour to the next person who gets the books, and almost certainly not being sent to an isolation cubicle for a week as punishment. One might argue that Morag Nisbet, or whoever it was, showed an emerging poetic appreciation of sound patterns in her choice of ‘bum’ for ‘book’.”

Blake’s collection reveals how subjects and authors in GCSE English anthologies have changed since the exams were established in 1988, with frequent selections including William Blake’s London, the “boat-stealing” episode of Wordsworth’s Prelude and Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est. Between 2004 and 2011, Seamus Heaney’s Follower was popular; between 2012 and 2016, Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess became a favoured choice.

Many of the books she has tracked down, crammed full of “regimented” annotations, reveal the mechanistic way in which poetry can be taught. One Walter Raleigh poem is exhaustively marked for rhyme, alliteration and “interesting vocab” – a judgment that could be applied to the word “doth” only if “a teacher has told you an examiner might like it”, Blake remarks in a blogpost.

The doodles also offer slices of school life. One anthology sees a pupil underlining a phrase in a poem by Norman Nicholson and adding the words “pretty aint it … Mrs Yonge said so … so there”.

“I can see this scene in the classroom,” says Blake. “This isn’t a child doodling on his own. This is two children next to each other, looking like they are quietly huddled over their books, making notes of the teacher’s bon mots, but in fact using their books to engage in a kind of written banter.”

Although English-language school poetry anthologies have been part of the classroom since the beginning of mass education in the 19th century, Blake explains, their history was unexplored. She embarked on her PhD after finding she had no answer for poets she met while working at the Poetry Archive, who asked her – as a former teacher – why the selections of poems in school anthologies were “so strange”.“The question stayed with me, some other professional experiences fed into it,” Blake says, “and eventually it got so itchy in my mind that I thought it was time to set about answering it properly.” She met Morag Styles and David Whitley from the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Cambridge’s Faculty of Education, who encouraged her to take this thinking further. With her thesis nearing completion, Blake has found that the number of anthologies declined as government regulation of the curriculum increased. In the 1980s there were more than 50 in circulation, covering around 7,000 poems. Today, there are four, featuring just 129 poems in total.

“The constant changes to the national curriculum meant awarding bodies had to keep changing their GCSE specifications,” she explains. “In time, they moved from recommending or specifying commercially produced book-form anthologies to producing their own A4 examination booklets of poems. These had advantages in that every pupil got one to keep, and that when you think about it is an extraordinary thing for children who don’t come from a house of books, but their production values aren’t the same.”

Over the years, the number of female poets selected has increased dramatically. In 1974, there was not a single woman included in the Worlds anthology, a situation that Blake says would be unthinkable now.

“Even with 129 poems, as now,” she says, “there is a joyful inclusion of poems by lots of different outstanding female poets, from Emily Dickinson to Imtiaz Dharker.”

The national curriculum also established the requirement in 1988 that literature from different countries and cultures should be included, she explains. “So we have had a wonderful range of poems included in GCSE anthologies by poets such as Daljit Nagra, Derek Walcott, Grace Nichols, John Agard, Imtiaz Dharker, Sujata Bhatt, and many others. These poems appear alongside and in dialogue with poems by other classic, modern and contemporary poets.”

Her exhibition includes a copy of Songes and Sonettes, also known as Tottel’s Miscellany, which Richard Tottel first published in 1557, making it the first printed anthology of poems in English. Including poems by Henry Howard, Thomas Wyatt and Nicholas Grimald, it sees Tottel exhorting his “unlearned” readers to use the poems to help purge their “swinelike grossness”. Alongside Tottel’s Miscellany sits the 1985 anthology Touched With Fire, which, four centuries later, also included Wyatt, and the poem beginning: “They flee from me that sometime did me seek.”

Blake has also included A Legacy for Young Ladies, an 1826 anthology of letters and poems addressed to young women by the poet Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and published posthumously by her niece Lucy Aikin. “Though not strictly a school poetry anthology, writers such as Barbauld, Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth argued for a better education for girls, and this book contributed to that discourse,” says Blake, who exhibits it next to the 1989 anthology Fire the Sun. “An explicitly feminist anthology, this offered poems attending to many different dimensions of female experience, including Ntozake Shange’s Get It and Feel Good. This is a rare bloom: until the mid-1990s, school poetry anthologies commonly excluded or marginalised female poets.” The most frequently anthologised selections from Sylvia Plath are poems that explore motherhood, she continued, such as You’re and Morning Song. “I never taught Fire the Sun. I wish I had.”