276°
Posted 20 hours ago

The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1918

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

TO THE PRESIDENT, 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. Anthologies are the route by which young people find poets, and this one is full of good introductions to good poets.”–Helen Vendler, The New Republic

urn:lcp:oxfordbookofengl00chri:epub:63ccefcc-1027-479a-a185-c55cc8b4628f Extramarc Columbia University Libraries Foldoutcount 0 Identifier oxfordbookofengl00chri Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t35183h0h Invoice 1213 Isbn 0192141821 Lccn 99020831 Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_module_version 0.0.5 Ocr_parameters -l eng Openlibrary_edition There are no meaningful notes on meaning or context and for many poems there's no comment on source. Poems aren't ever given a year of composition which makes context even harder to discern sometimes. 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.

Navigation menu

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." The glosses provided for obscure words are too rare - this is particularly a problem with the earliest poems. The spelling has sometimes been modernised but sometimes not and it leaves some words very confusing and the whole poem near impossible to understand. 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. James Joyce (from Collected Poems): Mr. Joyce; Messrs. Faber & Faber, Ltd.; The Viking Press, New York. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2013-10-14 16:04:17.622563 Bookplateleaf 0006 Boxid IA1156408 Boxid_2 CH121024 City Oxford [u.a.] Donor

T. E. Brown (from Collected Poems of T. E. Brown): the author's representatives; Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd.; The Macmillan Co., New York. 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). The book does have its points. Scottish poetry, traditionally a poor cousin, has been given something like its proper prominence. The selections from Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, whether or not they theoretically belong there, sure sound good. Matthew Arnold's "The Scholar-Gipsy", that bane of generations of sophomores with term papers due, has been reduced to a handful of stanzas which usefully demonstrate how bad a poem it really is. But taken as a whole, we find in this book that the anthologist's mission of portraying the sweep and blood of poetic tradition has been sacrificed to the department head's need not to hurt the feelings of anyone at the faculty meeting. It's not that the poems chosen are not worthwhile (though I for one could have done without Anthony Thwaite's tiresome poetry establishment in-joke of a poem consisting of all the names from Contemporary Poets, or Swinburne's really disgusting ode to foot fetishism and necrophilia, "The Leper"), it is that the necessity of satisfying all scholarly claimants leaves insufficient room for the poets and poems who really count. Lord Tennyson (from Works of Alfred Tennyson) the author's representative; Messrs. Macmillan Co., Ltd , The Macmillan Co., New York.

R. L. Stevenson: the executors; Messrs. Chatto & Windus, Ltd.; Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Mary Coleridge (from Poems): Sir Francis Newbolt and the executors of the late Sir Henry Newbolt; Messrs. Elkin Mathews. Edward Thomas (from Collected Poems of Edward Thomas) . Mrs. Edward Thomas and Messrs. Faber & Faber, Ltd. Rudyard Kipling (from Rewards and Fairies): Mrs. Kipling; Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd.; Messrs. Doubleday Doran & Co.; The Macmillan Co. of Canada, Ltd.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 I cannot comment on the poetry content because I am bad at poetry but I'll say a few things about the anthology. 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.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment