The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1918

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The New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1950 is a poetry anthology edited by Helen Gardner, and published in New York and London in 1972 by Clarendon Press. It was intended as a replacement for the older Quiller-Couch Oxford Book of English Verse. Selections were largely restricted to British and Irish poets (with Ezra Pound being allowed a special status). Taking a poet a day, I rediscovered a few poets I've always liked (Yeats, Blake), and found a few new favorites I hadn't much read before (Auden, Dryden, Tennyson). That's where this kind of anthology fishing expedition can be really handy. I'll be exploring further. Still, a lot of it is that kind of "Alas, fair Xanthrope, when I gaze into thy azure orbs, thou casteth me nigh unto Methushaleph's lorbs" stuff that temps me to dislike poetry.

FOR this Anthology I have tried to range over the whole field of English Verse from the beginning, or from the Thirteenth Century to this closing year of the Nineteenth, and to choose the best. Nor have I sought in these Islands only, but wheresoever the Muse has followed the tongue which among living tongues she most delights to honour. 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. 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.” Edward Thomas (from Collected Poems of Edward Thomas) . Mrs. Edward Thomas and Messrs. Faber & Faber, Ltd.Care has been taken with the texts. But I have sometimes thought it consistent with the aim of the book to prefer the more beautiful to the better attested reading. I have often excised weak or superfluous stanzas when sure that excision would improve; and have not hesitated to extract a few stanzas from a long ​poem when persuaded that they could stand alone as a lyric. The apology for such experiments can only lie in their success: but the risk is one which, in my judgement, the anthologist ought to take. A few small corrections have been made, but only when they were quite obvious. Consider Donne, who in Q's selection and contexting seems a metaphysical curiosity, a poet who developed an eccentric, albeit interesting, version of Elizabethan lyric. G's Donne is revealed as one of the most vibrantly alive human beings who ever lived. But it is after Keats, the section of Q's book which as G remarks with diplomatic mildness "had always given least satisfaction," where G has done what Q should have done in 1939. Most of the clunky Victorian poetic furniture has been hauled off to the Sally Ann (though G could not steel herself to throw out dear old "they told me, Heraclitus ...", and that great enforcer of yawns Matthew Arnold is still droning on about his carefree Oxford days), and the nervous splendors of twentieth century verse are intelligently grafted onto tradition according to a program which clearly and properly divides them into the build-up to "The Waste Land", "The Waste Land", and the aftermath of "The Waste Land." Lord Tennyson (from Works of Alfred Tennyson) the author's representative; Messrs. Macmillan Co., Ltd , The Macmillan Co., New York. The book feels like it REALLY overweights earlier poets from Elizabethan times etc. There *feels* like there's fewer modern poets than you'd expect. Maybe I'm wrong on that. The entirety of the Wasteland is reproduced so that's something I guess. I dunno 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').

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2013-10-14 16:04:17.622563 Bookplateleaf 0006 Boxid IA1156408 Boxid_2 CH121024 City Oxford [u.a.] DonorR. L. Stevenson: the executors; Messrs. Chatto & Windus, Ltd.; Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.