Description
The Oxford Book of English Verse, created in 1900 by Arthur Quiller-Couch and selected anew in 1972 by Helen Gardner, has established itself as the foremost anthology of English poetry: ample in span, liberal in the kinds of poetry presented.
This completely fresh selection brings in new poems andpoets from all ages, and extends the range by another half-century, to include many twentieth-century figures not featured before – among them Philip Larkin and Samuel Beckett, Thom Gunn and Elaine Feinstein – right up to Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.
Here, as before, are lyric (beginning with medieval song), satire, hymn, ode, sonnet, elegy, ballad…but also kinds of poetry not previously admitted: the riches of dramatic verse by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster; greatworks of translation that are themselves true English poetry, such as Chapman’s Homer (bringing in its happy wake Keats’s On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer), Dryden’s Juvenal, and many others; well-loved nursery rhymes, limericks, even clerihews.
English poetry from all parts of the British Isles is firmly represented – Henryson and MacDiarmid, for example, now join Dunbar and Burns from Scotland; James Henry, Austin Clarke, and J. M. Synge now join Allingham and Yeats from Ireland; R.S. Thomas joins Dylan Thomas from Wales – and Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet, writing in America before its independence in the 1770s, are given a rightful and rewarding place.
Some of the greatest long poems are here in their entirety – Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market – alongside some of the shortest, haikus, squibs, and epigrams.
Generous and wide-ranging, mixing familiar with fresh delights, this is an anthology to move and delight all who find themselves loving English verse.
