Description
Book SynopsisWith its fresh and glittering choice of the jewels of English poetry, Christopher Ricks's Oxford Book of English Verse third in succession, after Arthur Quiller-Couch's original volume (1900) and Helen Gardner's new selection (1972) is a treasury from more than seven centuries of the poet's art. Ampler in range up to Hughes and Heaney it combines celebrated poems with a wealth of newly-chosen works, giving us 'Sumer is icumen in' and Anna Seward's 'OldCat's Dying Soliloquy', Keats's 'To Autumn' and Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market', Hugh MacDiarmid's 'O Wha's the Bride?', Stevie Smith's 'Not Waving but Drowning', Larkin's 'Mr Bleaney', and hundreds more. For the first time, wonderful poems that are also translations are included, likewise nurseryrhymes, clerihews, and the great dramatic verse of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Lyric, laughter, song, satire, story: this is an anthology to move and delight all who find themselves loving English verse.
Trade ReviewRicks has an exceptionally sharp but benevolent eye for what is canonical, and also for what might shine, were the dust blown off it ... his selection is reliable and enterprising ... although authoritative, his book has about it a satisfying openness and variety. * Andrew Motion, Financial Times, 9/10/99 *
Ricks, I am pleased to see, has included no weak poems as concessions to "diversity," the poems in his Oxford Book of English Verse are almost uniformly worth reading, and the ones that fall below the usual level are included for a reason (for example, "Twinkle, twinkle little star") ... Gardner had a taste for the high and the holy. Ricks is more skeptical and more wide-ranging. He has a better sense of humor and he includes more light verse ... Ricks has an unmatched range of knowledge about English poetry ... it remains true that anthologies are the route by which young people find poets, and that this one is full of good introductions to good poets. * Helen Vendler, The New Republic, 15/11/99 *
The event to celebrate is the marvellous new edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse ... a treasure-house laid up in deliberate succession to Palgrave's Treasury ... it could not have been better done. Here are poems to remember, poems to make part of one's being, the movement of one's own mind. * David Sexton, Evening Standard, 7/10/99 *
Ricks has steered a canny course between tradition and innovation ... Someone had to take on the enormous - and political - job of deciding what is pestilence and what is poetry, what is worth keeping and what worth forgetting ... Ricks has performed that Herculean task splendidly. * Robert MacFarlane, Independent on Sunday, 3/10/99 *
hefty and handsome volume ... Ricks shows that, although his tastes are much more catholic, he has as sharp an ear as "Q" for the particular pleasure of lyric ... His is the first Oxford Book adequately to mark out the relations between English and Scottish poetry, and the generosity of his selection from Anglo-Welsh changes the twentieth-century picture ... his selection of poems is rewardingly the work of an exceptional critic. * John Kerrigan, TLS 15/10/99 *
Table of ContentsIntroduction ; POEMS ; Index of Authors ; Index of Foreign Authors in Translation or Imitation ; Index of Titles and First Lines
