Customer Reviews

John Skelton Eman Poet Lib #29 (Everyman Poetry)

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John Skelton is an early satirical English poet. Probably you already know who he is if you're reading this review! However, this collection of his poems is almost unreadably awful. First of all, the editor has chosen a pretty random selection of poems, ignoring the frequently-anthologized and enjoyable "Upon a Death's Head." What we have instead is fragments of a series of LONG comic satires concerning some nobeleman or another long ago named Wosley. If this is what you want, fine--this it the book for you. However, if you're looking for enjoyable poetry, it's lacking here because the satire is so obscure--you simply cannot understand references to contemporary events without having to flip back to the notes.

Therein lies the problem--the editor has made the infuriating decision to shove all the notes and the glosses of archaic words to the back of the book! With this kind of poetry, every other line requires a gloss and most pages a note, this is just completely unacceptable. Even worse than lack of glosses, several poems contain Latin phrases scattered throughout, and unless you are a Classics major, you're going to get a headache bouncing back to and forth from the end of the book for translations.

It gets two stars because the modernization is good. I never thought original spelling added anything to literature besides extra confusion. Had the book been laid out in an actually-readable fashion and included a better selection, I would have given it 4, minus one for the fact that Skelton's poetry doesn't stand the test of time.