Customer Reviews

The Oxford Book of English Verse

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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!

Don't worry ...

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.

After having studied with Professor Ricks many years ago, it was a joy to find that he had been tapped for the new edition of this book, the Oxford book of English Verse. (The permissions must have been a bear.) As you might know if you've ever read John Mortimer, previous editions have been appreciated by countless readers, including Rumpole of the Bailey (the fictional barrister), who enjoyed the Quiller-Couch edition like he did his cigars, lamb chops and port wine. This new edition from Oxford, handsomely published with a ribbon for marking the pages and the traditional Oxford blue binding, contains most of the poets we first-year undergrads students at Boston University used to hear about from Ricks: there's Stevie Smith, Phillip Larkin, William Wordsworth, Samuel Beckett, William Empson, and many others. It's a thoughtfully collected array of English poetry, chosen by one of the most perceptive critics active today. I hope you enjoy it.

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.

He said, I "have set my heart on choosing the best". "The best is the best, though a hundred judges have declared it so; nor had it been any feat to search out and insert the second-rate merely because it happened to be recondite." (Hear!,Hear!) Commenting on the modern propensity for disparagement of anything and everything Quiller-Couch wrote, "I am at a loss what to do with a fashion of morose disparagement; of sneering at things long by catholic consent accounted beautiful... . Be it allowed that these present times are dark. Yet what are our poets of use ---what are they for --- if they cannot hearten the crew with auspices of daylight?" "The reader, turning the pages of this book, will find this note of valiancy --- of the old Roman 'virtue' mated with cheerfulness --- dominant throughout, if in many curious moods."

Now those are reasons to include works in an anthology - because they are the best, because they inspire, because they are beautiful, because they are virtuous and cheerful - even when their mood is dark! Long live Quiller-Couch! And may you truly find "auspices of daylight" shining through this verse!

What a wonderful treasure this book is! Certainly one could debate what has been left out and why what is included here was chosen over some other verse, but there is a lot of beauty included here. For me, it is a wonderful place to visit again and again to dip into this and that and to notice things I hadn't seen before.

I think that getting focused on what isn't in this collection is to cheat yourself of the beauty that is here. Not every work is to my taste, not every work is even what I think of as good, but the range and scope of works included is really wonderful. There are many works of great beauty and more of great worth. I think it is a fine collection.

One of the nice things I have found is that something I didn't at first find attractive opened up to me after repeated visits. The breadth of the music created with our language is stunning to me and has given me a great deal of pleasure.

There are 822 works in this collection that are arranged chronologically from the 13th century through the mid 1990s and grouped by poet. There is an index by author, by foreign authors in translation or imitation, and an index of works by first line. This organization makes it very easy to find a work that you might be looking for or to decide where to dip into the pool depending on how you feel at the moment.

This is a wonderful gift, not only for others but yourself.
To have a significant fraction of western poetry in one book make this a timeless acquisition.
Not only are the aesthetics of the prose attractive but the binding has a tactile quality too!

No matter what your mood there is a poet waiting to speak to you in this book.

`The Oxford Book of English Verse', edited by Christopher Ricks is 662 pages of selections from virtually every British subject poet you may think of, plus a whole lot more. The most important aspect of the collection is the qualifier `British' is more accurate than `English', as American, Canadian, Australian, Indian, South African, and other English-speaking poets are not included. The second most important fact is this is not a `best of' collection. It is much more of a sampler of the great broad range of `English' poetry than it is a collection of the best English poems. If it were the latter, the book would potentially be dominated by Shakespeare, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Yeats, Chaucer, and Spencer. The advantage of this editorial strategy is that we get samples of so many different poets we would otherwise know nothing about. Taking 20th poets born in the 20th century as an example, I only recognize the names of Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, and Samuel Beckett. I do not recognize the names of the other 29 British authors included in the collection.

This does not mean all known British authors have been indiscriminately included in this collection. Two 20th century British authors, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien happened to write a fairly sizable amount of poetry, although much of it may have been published posthumously. But, the fact is, neither author was nearly as good a poet as they were scholars of literature and philology or as good as they were writers of fantasy fiction. In contrast, there are three poems from fellow fantasy writer Lewis Carroll. Unfortunately, the space constraints in the book forbid including any longer works, so, Carroll's most famous poem, `The Hunting of the Snark' is not even included in part. Similarly, only a part of T. S. Elliot's most famous poem, `The Hollow Men' is included. Very oddly, the Elliot sample also doesn't include any poems from his `Cats' book. Including Carroll's `Jabberwocky' but not including these seems odd.

For being a collection limited to British authors, there is a surprising amount of weight given to the artistic statements of Ezra Pound in the introduction.

I bought this book as a source for my search of a GOOD poem about Christmas. It is relatively easy to find syrupy stuff or texts of Christmas Carols, but not so easy to find original sentiments.

For that purpose, this book is good, but not as good as it could be. You get the usual index of titles and first lines, but as I found out, many good poems that fit my criteria may not show themselves in the title or first line. An index of key words would have been even better, so I could look for `Christmas' or `Nativity' or the like.

If you know nothing of English poetry and wish to take up the subject, this is an excellent collection. Again, it is NOT a `best of' but a sampler to help you locate those poets in whom you may wish to read further. If the Oxford University Press would ever deign to take advice from the likes of me, I would include a bibliography of major works from all the authors quoted herein.

Recommended.

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. Thus we find the ancient roots of English song cut back almost to nothing, Donne demoted to an eccentric intellectual rake who got religion at the end, Byron a writer of verse novels which must have seemed quite shocking in their day, a Yeats unstained by politics, and an Eliot who wrote one memorable poem about a sad case named Prufrock wandering about London, as well as a number of interesting experiments -- the book omits all but eight lines of "The Waste Land"! There could be not better indication that this anthology neither leads popular taste nor follows it: it is hermetically sealed from it, and it represents the final transformation of the anthologist as lover of poetry into the anthologist as professor. Its poems are not episodes in the great epic of which all poems worth knowing are a part, but specimens; the book is not really an anthology, but a syllabus, and it gives us the great body of English poetry with its heart cut out. Those who want at least one major anthology of poetry in their library would do better to get this book's predecessor, The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1950 by Helen Gardner (Oxford Books of Verse) still available, or better yet, the book I consider to be the best single poetry anthology, The Atlantic Book of British and American Poetry by Edith Sitwell out of print but still available used.

Recent poems are hard to come by in the new OxfordBook of English Verse, but one must remember the world we live intoday. Modern works are more than likely under copyright, making them horribly expensive to reproduce in a collection. Thus, when it comes to modern works, it is more a question of funds, copyrights, and dealmaking, not of quality literature. In light of this (and combined with the fact that, most likely, Ricks had to pay for the rights to the copyrighted poems he did print out of his own pocket), the quality of the modern verse in this volume is first rate. The giants of English literature are well represented, as are those poets whom one should, but too often does not, know. Any student of English literature would probably have many of these poems at hand, but not compiled in such a manner. Likewise, those with an interest in poetry but no idea where to start, are encouraged to start with Ricks' book.

It is interesting that you have what looks to be two scholars of English going back and fourth about works or how this particular edition is sub par to the one made in the 1940's.

Anthologies are books pretty much gathered and published for someone in a dusty old back room office of some university to keep from being totally banished into obscurity. Take it for what it is! If the anthology replaces the old school stuff with the new school.... here is an idea --- buy both! That way you have two books that cover each other, and one more anthology can't hurt now can it? It is true the older book does have more in terms of English/early poetry, and you should get it, but its also just as well to purchase this one too.

I do however have a complaint, the type is very small and you almost have to use a magnifying glass to read it all, nevertheless, treat it as a nice anthology in your library!