The Oxford Book of English Verse

Edited and introduced by Christopher Ricks

Over 820 wonderful poems, long and short, covering seven and a half centuries of English verse from all parts of the British Isles.
Over twice as many women poets as before, from Mary Herbert to Anna Seward, Frances Cornford, and Elizabeth Daryush.
More Irish, Scottish, and Welsh poets than before — among them Beckett, Synge, R. S. Thomas, Henryson, and MacDiarmid
Edited and introduced by Christopher Ricks, described by W. H. Auden as 'exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding'
Christopher Ricks's introduction surveys the touchstones that great poet-critics have given us for evaluating the art of poetry, from Ben Jonson and Dryden to Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, Pound, and Eliot

The Oxford Book of English Verse

Edited and introduced by Christopher Ricks

Description

Here is a treasure-house of over seven centuries of English poetry, chosen and introduced by Christopher Ricks, whom Auden described as 'exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding'. 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 and poets 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; great works 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.

The Oxford Book of English Verse

Edited and introduced by Christopher Ricks

The Oxford Book of English Verse

Edited and introduced by Christopher Ricks

Author Information

Edited and introduced by Christopher Ricks, Warren Professor of the Humanities, Boston University

The Oxford Book of English Verse

Edited and introduced by Christopher Ricks

Reviews and Awards

"Ricks 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

The Oxford Book of English Verse

Edited and introduced by Christopher Ricks

From Our Blog

Bloody but unbowed

By Sonia Tsuruoka Not much remains to be said about the politics of the written word: scores of historical biographers have examined the literary appetites of revolutionaries, and how what they read determined how they interpreted the world. Mohandas Gandhi read Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience during his two-month incarceration in South Africa.

Posted on October 19, 2013

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