The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1918

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This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. G. K. Chesterton. Miss Collins, Messrs. Methuen & Co., Ltd., and Messrs. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York (for 'The Rolling English Road'); Messrs. J. M. Dent & Co., Ltd. (for 'The Donkey'). James Joyce (from Collected Poems): Mr. Joyce; Messrs. Faber & Faber, Ltd.; The Viking Press, New York. To the President and Fellows and Scholars of Trinity College Oxford / a house of learning; ancient, liberal, humane, and my most kindly nurse"

BY favour of the Public, The Oxford Book of English Verse has held its own in request for close upon forty years. The editor would stand convicted of dullness indeed if in these years he had not learnt, revising his judgement, to regret some inclusions and omissions; of indolence, moreover, the industry of scholars having rescued to light meanwhile many gems long hidden away in libraries, miscellanies, even scrap-books. In this new edition, therefore, I have risked repairing the old structure with a stone here, a tile there, and hope to have left it as weather-proof as when it as first built.

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Care has been taken with the texts. But I have sometimes thought it consistent with the aim of the book to prefer the more beautiful to the better attested reading. I have often excised weak or superfluous stanzas when sure that excision would improve; and have not hesitated to extract a few stanzas from a long ​poem when persuaded that they could stand alone as a lyric. The apology for such experiments can only lie in their success: but the risk is one which, in my judgement, the anthologist ought to take. A few small corrections have been made, but only when they were quite obvious.

There's no contents or an index of poem titles - I realise this isn't always possible but it'd still be useful. There's just an index of poets and first lines. Which is useful! But sometimes you need other things too. T. E. Brown (from Collected Poems of T. E. Brown): the author's representatives; Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd.; The Macmillan Co., New York. I cannot comment on the poetry content because I am bad at poetry but I'll say a few things about the anthology. There are no meaningful notes on meaning or context and for many poems there's no comment on source. Poems aren't ever given a year of composition which makes context even harder to discern sometimes.The book feels like it REALLY overweights earlier poets from Elizabethan times etc. There *feels* like there's fewer modern poets than you'd expect. Maybe I'm wrong on that. The entirety of the Wasteland is reproduced so that's something I guess. I dunno Consider Donne, who in Q's selection and contexting seems a metaphysical curiosity, a poet who developed an eccentric, albeit interesting, version of Elizabethan lyric. G's Donne is revealed as one of the most vibrantly alive human beings who ever lived. But it is after Keats, the section of Q's book which as G remarks with diplomatic mildness "had always given least satisfaction," where G has done what Q should have done in 1939. Most of the clunky Victorian poetic furniture has been hauled off to the Sally Ann (though G could not steel herself to throw out dear old "they told me, Heraclitus ...", and that great enforcer of yawns Matthew Arnold is still droning on about his carefree Oxford days), and the nervous splendors of twentieth century verse are intelligently grafted onto tradition according to a program which clearly and properly divides them into the build-up to "The Waste Land", "The Waste Land", and the aftermath of "The Waste Land." The glosses provided for obscure words are too rare - this is particularly a problem with the earliest poems. The spelling has sometimes been modernised but sometimes not and it leaves some words very confusing and the whole poem near impossible to understand. R. L. Stevenson: the executors; Messrs. Chatto & Windus, Ltd.; Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.