A literary-historical account of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon writings to the present.

Anthology of about 600 poems from more than 200 twentieth century English poets.

This is a teaching anthology arranged chronologically and concentrating on major poets, with a more selective treatment of significant minor writers. Intended for both survey and genre courses in poetry, it provides the basic texts for the study of a poet's work in some depth and establishes maximum interrelations among poems, poets and periods so that it can be used to show changes in genre and mode, as well as historical and literary influences.The anthology presents the key poems for understanding our poetic tradition. Selection is based on the excellence of the poems themselves along with the following considerations: how well they reflect their period, show the development of a genre or mode, illustrate the best aspects of the individual poet's craft, and speak to the twentieth-century sensibility. As a general principle, but not a rigorous one, all selections are complete works. This differs from competing anthologies in providing a liberal selection of Canadian poetry.In addition to headnotes for each poet, the anthology includes a comprehensive fifty-page essay on versification and prosody and an author/title index.

More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 4 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.