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

This is a story-book, universal in its appeal and representative of a literary tradition from Chaucer to Auden. Its tales are of various kinds - romantic, humorous, ghostly, and gory, written over the past six hundred years.Here will be found Pope's 'Rape of the Lock' and Coleridge's 'Ancient Mariner'; the tale of John Gilpin and of the Idiot Boy; 'The Lady of Shalott', 'The Pied Piper', and Lewis Carroll's 'The Hunting of the Snark'. In the twentieth century the narrative tradition is exemplified by Chesterton andMasefield, Charles Causley and C. Day-Lewis, amongst others.Most of the fifty-nine poems in this collection are given in their entirety, but abridgements and extracts from book-length narratives such as 'The Faerie Queene' and 'Paradise Lost' add to the richness and variety.

Great Britain has a long and grand tradition of poets translating classical authors. Virtually every great poet from Chaucer on has tried his or her hand at translation, with the results often rivalling or even excelling the ancient original. This unique anthology presents the best of these translations, ranging from King Alfred, Alexander Pope, and Ben Jonson, to Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ezra Pound, and Ted Hughes. The book offers a vast array of responses to the song, verse, and drama of ancient Greece and Rome, and to poets themselves as varied as Homer, Sappho, Euripides, Virgil, Ovid, and Juvenal. Organized by classical author and text, the book gathers and juxtaposes English versions, sometimes of the same passage or poem, to dramatize the endless renewal of one great poetic tradition in and through another.

Christopher Ricks's celebrated anthology presents a wonderfully varied collection of Victorian poetry, with 560 poems by 115 authors. The great figures of the period - Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Hopkins - are strongly represented, but light verse and nonsense poetry have not been neglected. With most poems given in their entirety, this is a lively and exciting anthology of Victorian verse selected by an expert in the field.

No previous anthology has succeeded in illustrating so thoroughly the kinds of verse actually written in the eighteenth century. The familiar tradition is fully represented by selections from such poets as Pope, Swift, Tomson, Gray, Smart, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, and Blake. In addition, the anthology includes verse by many forgotten writers, both men and women, from all levels of society. Although they have never figured in conventional literary history, they wrote humorous, idiosyncratic, and graphic verse about their personal experience and the world around them, in a way that should challenge received ideas about the period's restraints and inhibitions.