The Oxford Book of English Verse

With 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 'Old Cat'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 nursery rhymes, 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.