Customer Reviews

The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse

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The selection of sixteenth century poetry here is representative and generally sensible. The important names throughout -- Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Sackville, Gascoigne, Spenser, Sidney -- are given a fair showing, and I have only two notable quibbles with the selection. The first is that the Faerie Queene selections are too patchy to give a good idea of Spenser's narrative method, and the second is that Skelton's magnificent "Colyn Clout" is left out. (I don't know much about the minor poets of this period, so I can't really say much about the editors' selection there.)

The one thing that's really unsatisfactory about the Oxford Verse series is the silliness of its period divisions. This book consists of English poetry 1500-1600, and if a poem was written in 1601 it's put in the Seventeenth Century book. So several poets get split up between the volumes, and each volume on its own does a very inadequate job of representing authors who straddle the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some of Donne's and Jonson's earlier work is in the 16.c. book; Campion, Chapman, Greville, and Drayton are split down the middle; a couple of very good poems by Daniel show up in the 17.c. book; and so on. It would have been better to decide (albeit a little arbitrarily) that Daniel was a 16.c. writer and Donne was a 17.c. writer. Or, if each volume had to be made comprehensive, to duplicate selections.