The Oxford Book of English Verse

An anthology of roughly seven centuries of poetry in English, from medieval song forward, selected and introduced by Christopher Ricks for the 1999 edition. Ricks widened the brief his predecessors had worked under: alongside the lyric, ode, sonnet, elegy and ballad he admitted dramatic verse from Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson and Webster, verse translation that had become English poetry in its own right — Chapman’s Homer, Dryden’s Juvenal — and light forms down to nursery rhymes and clerihews.

An anthology is a compressed argument about what the tradition consists of, which is why the Oxford Book of English Verse has been re-edited rather than reprinted: Quiller-Couch’s 1900 selection, Gardner’s in 1972 and Ricks’s in 1999 disagree about the canon in instructive ways. For a reader being handed one book of poetry, the case for this one is coverage plus an editor who is candid that selection is a judgement.

Context: Listed under Poetry in the Ages 13-99+ band, Lexile 1300 — a single number for an anthology spanning Chaucer to the twentieth century is necessarily an average of very different things.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the curriculum this came from; the adult “Ages 13-99+” band is the part Kyle carded.
• Christopher Ricks — the editor.
• Poetry — the form.
• The Complete Works of Shakespeare — the source of the dramatic verse Ricks’s edition newly admitted; already in the anti-library.
• Paradise Lost — the long poem an anthology can only excerpt, carded separately.
• Reading — an anthology is a reading programme disguised as a single volume.
• Republic of Letters — the portfolio idea.