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Product Details
Hardcover: 750 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (December 16, 1999)
i own an earlier edition of the OBEV, published about 1940, and while i'm glad to see that some dramatic verse has made the cut here, i'm perplexed as to a couple of poets who have been left out this time around. . .in particular, the young yeats' contemporaries (the so-called the 'tragic' generation)--lionel johnson and ernest dowson. also, some of the anonymous scottish ballads from the 15th century of course this book compared to practically anything else gets 5 stars, 10 stars! i just knocked one off because of my preference for the earlier edition, and so that people would notice my humble review here. enjoy this book!
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53 of 63 people found the following review helpful
Unkinder souls might regard this book as a travesty of and insult to the brilliant collection originally assembled by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch under the very same name. But not I. No, this book is just fine by me, as far as it goes--not that its 822 works and 662 pages go all that far when compared to the 967 entries and 1172 pages of Quiller-Couch's 1940 edition. Easy come, easy go, say I. And Ricks even manages to cram in an extra 59 years of new material, too! Why, only the other day, I was lamenting stodgy old Quiller-Couch's inexplicable omission of such vital poetic material as "Twinkle, twinkle, little star."
I am delighted to see that Amazon's professional reviewers are fully up to the mark in emphasizing Ricks' politically correct limitation of his poetic sources to Britain--as opposed to the imperialist graspings of devious old Quiller-Couch. Why, anyone can see that for all intents and purposes crafty Q made his "Oxford Book of English Verse" a Yankee tome by ceding to such Americans as Dickinson, Emerson, Harte, Poe, Whittier and Whitman a full 12 entries and parts of no less than 18 pages! (No doubt, J. Edgar Hoover, HUAC and the CIA's nefarious predecessors were overjoyed.)
... be happy!
A FURTHER COMMENT: Normally, I'd assume that everybody would get the point I am making, but a re-read of the reviews of this book convinces me that I had better be more explicit. Run, do not walk, to your nearest, dusty, retro, low-tech, used bookshop and grasp a copy of any Quiller-Couch edition--however beaten up and dog-eared--to your bosom, there to treasure it forever. You can then put Ricks' edition to its proper use as a doorstop.
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29 of 35 people found the following review helpful
There is something magisterial about much of pre-20th century english verse, and this book contains some of the best. However, it also leaves out much of the best and is hundreds of pages shorter than the Quiller-Couch editions in spite of including new authors and dramatic verse not included in the Quiller-Couch versions. And what Ricks has done is nothing short of shameful, changing a collection of "the best" (according to Quiller-Couch) into a survey - some of which are anything but "the best".
The Quiller-Couch versions have the subtitle "1250-1918"; this version includes up to the later 20th century. Besides deleting so much of the old but fine poetry, the main problem in including recent poetry is that most of it is not very good. (There, I've said it!) Obscurity should never be confused with profundity!
All editors or anthologists have a reason for including various works. Many recent collections use ridiculous grounds for inclusion like gender, sexual perversion, skin color, year of publication, or political grounds (as if these factors have anything to do with quality!). If that's what you're looking for, then by all means buy these inferior collections chosen by chip-on-their-shoulder editors who feel nothing but disdain for their readers and feel the need to teach us lesser breeds what good taste truly is (anything they say it is can be the only objective criterion - especially if it is offensive, obscure, obscene and politically-correct). I know I'm blaming Rickman for the excesses of others, but he is a representative of their ilk.
But if you seek something else in poetry, then give the Quiller-Couch editions a whirl. And read what Quiller-Couch says about his reasons for inclusion in his collection.Read more ›
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In the days when there was actually a general audience for poetry, that audience's taste was both formed and reflected by anthologies which generally were created by by lovers of poetry -- the phrase, though it may sound pretentious, is the accurate one -- whose books were a quite conscious effort both to form and to reflect that taste. Today things are different: poetry has become largely an academic enterprise, and accordingly current anthologies tend to reflect not the taste of a general audience but the specialist jockeying that goes in English departments. There could hardly be a better example of this trend than Christopher Ricks's edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse. 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.Read more ›
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