The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1918

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Generous and wide-ranging, mixing familiar with fresh delights, this is an anthology to move and delight all who find themselves loving English verse. James Joyce (from Collected Poems): Mr. Joyce; Messrs. Faber & Faber, Ltd.; The Viking Press, New York. A. E. Housman (from Last Poems and A Shropshire Lad): the literary executors, Messrs. Henry Holt, Inc., New York.

One of the magical characteristics of great poetry is that it can alter the earlier poetry which influenced it. No one who grew up reading "The Waste Land" will be able to rid Spenser or Shakespeare or Webster of the overtones which Eliot drew from them, and nobody who knows or cares anything about poetry would want to try. The greatest achievement of G's edition is to give us modernism not only as an extension of tradition but as the climax of it, and the impact of "The Waste Land" in G's setting is the prime example of this: the song of Eliot's nightingale arising from the frightening darkness of the urban wilderness, however tragic, is also consoling, since we realize we have been hearing it forever.

Find sources: "The Oxford Book of English Verse"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( November 2019) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) To the President and Fellows and Scholars of Trinity College Oxford / a house of learning; ancient, liberal, humane, and my most kindly nurse" There's no contents or an index of poem titles - I realise this isn't always possible but it'd still be useful. There's just an index of poets and first lines. Which is useful! But sometimes you need other things too.

R. L. Stevenson: the executors; Messrs. Chatto & Windus, Ltd.; Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. And yet the advantages of G's critical perspective have ominous implications exactly because it is a critic's perspective. In G, Q's balancing act between the critic as summarizer of taste and as the prescriptor of it has shifted in favor of the latter. We can see this for instance in G's determination to open up the anthology to "satiric, political, epistolary, and didactic verse," a decision which however justifiable surely is not based on any growing popularity of those forms among the public between 1939 and 1972. It is based instead on the fact that the search of scholars for new topics to write about which do not already bear a crushing weight of commentary has resulted in those genres becoming recognized English department specializations. Since academic politics requires that no one in the department be left out, it is necessary that representatives of all these genres be included in the poetic canon, and anthologies are the primary means of communicating this judgment to the public. We may see G's edition as standing at a crossroads, or perhaps a better metaphor would be a hilltop, a critical vantage point from which a broader and more judicious survey may be made than previously, but which is also farther removed from the ordinary social world.

Edward Thomas (from Collected Poems of Edward Thomas) . Mrs. Edward Thomas and Messrs. Faber & Faber, Ltd. From Arthur Quiller-Couch’s 1919 Introduction to this extensive collection: “For this Anthology I have tried to range over the whole field of English Verse…. To bring home and render so great a spoil compendiously has been my capital difficulty. It is for the reader to judge if I have so managed it as to serve those who already love poetry and to implant that love in some young minds not yet initiated.” G. K. Chesterton. Miss Collins, Messrs. Methuen & Co., Ltd., and Messrs. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York (for 'The Rolling English Road'); Messrs. J. M. Dent & Co., Ltd. (for 'The Donkey').