Customer Reviews

Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Blackwell Annotated Anthologies)

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Good anthologies of eighteenth-century poetry are hard to come by, so when I taught a course on the subject I naturally leaped at this book. But while its coverage is admirable, reflecting new interest in both women poets (Leapor, Barbauld, Seward) and underread male poets (Chatterton, Dyer, Parnell), the book nevertheless was difficult to teach. Annotation and historical backgroud proved inadequate even for advanced English majors, particularly given the classics-heavy subject matter. Too, some editorial policies proved frustrating, particularly the decision to delete or sharply abridge the original footnotes from Gay's *The Shepherd's Week* and Pope's *The Dunciad*--omissions that fatally obscure both poems' satiric intentions. Nevertheless, the emphasis on full-length poems over excerpts is welcome (one area in which the book notably improves on its primary competition, Lonsdale's two Oxford anthologies). It's hardly a bad book--quite the contrary--but it could stand some thoughtful revision.

I've been teaching 18th and 19th century poetry courses for a few years and this anthology is the best I've found. The editorial choices favor the canon, as an anthology should. Many full texts of major poems are included, but so are texts of poems often overlooked but vital to a comprehensive survey. There are long excerpts of Thompson's The Seasons, for example, which very few anthologies think to include because it is a somewhat mind-numbing read and *hard* to teach to undergraduates; it is by far one of the most important poems of the early c18 decades. Because the anthology accounts for both a poem's initial reception and its teachability, it surpasses the competition.

In Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, David Fairer and Christine Gerrard have created an important portable library. The contents have been organized in a variety of useful ways (chronologically as well as thematically) and insightfully selected to cover a range of voices and topics. The annotations stand up to repeated readings; the scholarship displays a rare mixture of subtlety and depth of knowledge. Although it is an invaluable teaching tool for undergraduates, I keep it on my desk as an accessible and meticulously accurate reference resource. There is no finer work of its kind.