The Oxford Book of English Verse

by Christopher Ricks (Editor)

Let's get one thing straight. Christopher Ricks's 1999 version of The Oxford Book of English Verse contains some of the finest poetry the world has ever seen. Judiciously selected and beautifully produced, this anthology will reward both poetry virgins and over-versed roués with its canny, sometimes inspired conjoining of the familiar and the obscure. (It's also the first edition to let dramatic verse through the gate, meaning that some of the Bard's greatest lines have now made the cut.) From the medieval "Sumer is icumen in" through Seamus Heaney's "The Pitchfork," Ricks selects 822 poems from more than 200 writers. Not surprisingly, Shakespeare comes out on top. But Wyatt, Sidney, Jonson, Milton, Pope, Blake, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Hardy also make strong showings, as do such under-anthologized females as Mary Robinson, Jane Taylor, and Frances Cornford. In addition, the editor includes an assortment of mnemonically irresistible nursery rhymes.

Anyone who cares about literature in the English language will want this on their shelf. Yet some of those same devotees may have serious reservations about what Ricks has done with this literary institution. When Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote his preface to the first Oxford Book of English Verse in October 1900, his agenda was quite clear. He had

tried to range over the whole field of English Verse from the beginning, or from the Thirteenth Century to this closing year of the Nineteenth, and to choose the best. Nor have I sought in these Islands only, but wheresoever the Muse has followed the tongue which among living tongues she most delights to honour. To bring home and render so great a spoil compendiously has been my capital difficulty.

The metaphors of imperial colonialism spoke confusedly as the Muse followed the English tongue throughout the world and the anthologist brought back the rewards it wrought and wreaked. A century later, the project of "English verse" has lost its imperial certainty, and Ricks is no longer interested in exploiting the former colonies for raw material. Instead, he states categorically that his "does not seek to be a book of Anglophone verse, of verse in the English language whatever its provenance." This leads to some anomalies. He takes American verse only through the 1770s, but is happy to include verse from the Republic of Ireland. As for the linguistic products of the pre-independence Commonwealth: "I judged reluctantly that pre-independence poetry had not achieved poetic independence (freedom from diluted fashion), had not given to the world such poetic accomplishments as would constitute a claim to the pages of an anthology of the best in English poetry." Please discuss!

Ricks's "English verse," then, is predominantly verse from England, and of a fairly senior variety at that--the juniors here are such golden codgers as Thom Gunn, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney. Ricks admits that "most of us are not good at appreciating the poetry of those appreciably younger than we are." That's a shame, because it denies The Oxford Book of English Verse a role in disseminating the work of the younger generation (and we're talking under 60 here) from a diversity of backgrounds. What he has undoubtedly produced, however, is an invaluable record of the past glories of English poetry, which will continue to inspire both readers and poets--whatever their age, wherever they are. --Alan Stewart

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fiction, Reference, Literature, British Literature, Collections

690 pages, Hardcover

First published October 7, 1999

About the author

Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks, FBA, is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (U.S.) and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (England) from 2004 to 2009. He is the immediate past-president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book-length; a trenchant reviewer of writers he considers pretentious (Marshall McLuhan, Christopher Norris, Geoffrey Hartman, Stanley Fish); and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous (F. R. Leavis, W. K. Wimsatt, Christina Stead). Hugh Kenner has praised his 'intent eloquence', and Geoffrey Hill his 'unrivalled critical intelligence'. W. H. Auden described Ricks as 'exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding'.

Reviews

[Steve]

These poems were more than read,
Yes, I stood, strolled, and spoke
Every word herein – when alone
With time sufficient to measure and weigh.

A secret confession I will share –
For my voice, hereby armèd, thereby empowered,
Cast Christina, the Samuels, the Williams, and all,
In pace and tone, flat or flourished, as I devisèd.

Thus an unexpected discovery,
Yet one I roundly deem profound,
Now confided in bonded trust to thee –
Moments of stealthy felicity.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I must be turning into a real softie! This is a wonderful journey through nearly a thousand years of English verse and covers all subjects. This is a real reflection of many British poets those known and unknown.

One of the best things about this collection of verse that it has all the usual suspects represented but not all their verse but a collection of many of their works minus some of their more well known writings.

This is a wonderful and inspirational book something that I enjoy dipping in to time and time again.

[Madeline Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were some works in here that were quite touching including multiple eulogies for lost children B U T the far majority of the first 60% is all snow white or ivory or white pillow breasts and I swear I couldn't tell if I was going slowly to try to appreciate it or annoyed by all the beautiful faces and boobs that I had to keep putting it down. And then at about 60% Samuel Taylor Coleridge comes out of NOWHERE with Rime of the Ancient Mariner and I'm like oh yeah right poetry can be awesome.

Some notes:
Man literally writes poem for his lute
Winter Nights by Thomas Campion and Thomas Love Peacock have the sauce
John Fletcher did NOT have the sauce
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

[Shouvik Hore · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fairly Unhappy. There could have been passages from The Prelude, Shelley's Epipsychidion and Alastor, John Keats' O Solitude! , When I have fears and The Eve Of St. Mark, Tennyson's Break, Break, Break, Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra, Prospice, Arnold's Thyrsis & much more influential real, authentic poetry. This obsession with filling the pages of a prestigious publication with a needless lot of Eliot and his semi or unpoetical successors gets on nerves. There is no James Thomson in this collection, no Extracts from Summer, Spring, Autumn or Winter. There is no extract from Christabel, nor from Cowper's The Task.
I still fail to understand this lingering lust for Modernist poetry, which is much poor in terms of execution and quality, even below the mediocre kind. The likes of real poets up till the mid nineteenth century are by and large treated dismally. There is even no Francis Thompson in this volume.
Things ought to change.

[Gavin Lightfoot · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit of a mammoth book of poetry but it does give you a very good snapshot of poetry through the ages, from the 13th to the 20 century. From the Germanic medieval verse through to Shakespeare's time and to more modern poets like Larkin and Heaney.

[Jon Corelis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing

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 (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.

[Billy Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Occasionally I will go through an entire anthology of verse and note down poems to return to, and this has been my third time going through this anthology. My five-star rating is a very personal one as I've had this book for years now, it is what introduced me to poetry beyond the little verses we're taught in school. The more poetry I read, however, the more I realise there are some frustrating choices in this anthology, which will inevitably happen when an editor attempts to collate a canonical collection. The scant attention paid to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the importance placed on Robert Graves (whose critical praise baffles me), the inclusion of Shakespeare's songs which would be better replaced with more soliloquies, and the general inclusion of uninteresting works. The most frustrating is the lack of American poets, I don't understand how one can edit an anthology of English verse today without including Walt Whitman, whose influence on Modernism is too large to ignore.

Despite these reservations, this would still serve as a decent introduction to the verse of this country for young people, but read it with a critical eye and do not think that Ricks' inclusion of a poem means that you have to respect it.

[sch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aug 2018 - Jan 2020. A rich textbook for survey classes (13C to 20C). In the older poems, the editor has left unchanged much of the spelling and punctuation, so we can more accurately compare (say) Shakespeare, often heavily edited in student editions, with Sidney or Spenser. There's a sprinkling of Irish and Scottish poetry (footnoting unfamiliar words and expressions), but "English" still seems the right word, as opposed to "British."

Had I world enough and time, I'd read the older editions of the OBEV to analyze the additions and omissions.

[Terry · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me the selection is far too steeped in the distant past. I would have liked more of the modern verse. There is only for instance a couple of poems from the likes of Sassoon. More of Keats, Wordsworth, Shelly etc. much of the 15th/ 16th century inclusions were too dated. Not a book for the casual poetry reader. I was disappointed

[Angel Serrano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Antología poética de la literatura inglesa desde sus orígenes en el siglo XIII hasta el siglo XX. Incluye nombres tan reconocidos como Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Pope, Burns, Keats, Lord Byron, Lord Tennyson, Brönte, Carroll, Hardy, Stevenson, Kipling, Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot...

[Jehosheba · Rating 4 out of 5]

After six months, I reach the end of a journey that began in the thirteenth century and ended in the twentieth. I read more poetry in this one book than I have in my entire life.

But even a 600-page anthology can’t include everything.

And therefore someone will always be shocked or horrified that one poem wasn’t contained and another was. This collection offers a sampling of many different poets while not providing a full course of any. It’s meant to whet the appetite.

An anthologist, naturally enough, cannot but be aware of what in the end could not, sadly, be included, and of what had to be reduced to an excerpt. This awareness is salutary for him or her, but should not be passed on as a sadness to the reader, who has wonderfully more than enough to be getting on with.
(Christopher Ricks, Preface)

I think there is danger in reading only a selection of a poet’s writings. A person could read the four poems from Richard Lovelace in this collection, decide they don’t like them, and never read Richard Lovelace again. Above all, when you read a collection, you have to do it with the intention of following it up with reading of your own afterward.

If you’ve not read much English poetry, this is a great place to start.

I came to this book as someone who had always avoided poetry. I knew I liked Tennyson and Shakespeare and William Cowper but had doubts about the rest. I left this book with dozens of poets I plan to read more extensively.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like a stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
(John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer)

I appreciate the thoughtfulness with which these poems were collected and formatted. Being chronologically arranged, this book gives you the wonderful opportunity (if you read it straight through) of “watching” English poetry change through each era.

In the end, I can’t complain because most of my favorites were here.

Selections from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”, Cowper’s “Light Shining out of Darkness”, Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” . . .
Also, many more which became unexpected new favorites.

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy!
(Gerard M. Hopkins, The Windhover)

And on the bright side, if you leave this anthology feeling as though you’ve got a pretty good grasp of British poetry, there is still the vastness of American poetry left for you to explore.

[Adam Mills · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the definitive collection of poetry in English. It contains a huge mixture of familiar and unfamiliar poems and also poets. The editor Christopher Ricks has done a magnificent job assembling this collection. As one reviewer states 'a book that can be thrown open to almost any page and instantly conjure five minutes (or an hour) of soul-lifting congress with Art'.

[Amanda Hunsberger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good as a reference book for an English major. Not for someone who's just discovering poetry and looking for a light introduction haha.

[Kat In the Hat · Rating 4 out of 5]

do you like poems about the devil? well you will enjoy this!
Great collection and cool to see different styles in the same era changing year to year

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since my brain has started to wither on the stem, I picked up the OBoEV with the goal of learning a poem a week. I'm falling short of the goal and some of the work can be a little Iambic but.... I've rediscovered the delights of the form. Take advice from this old Englishman--pick up a copy of the above and take a nibble of the pleasing passions of poetry. It will reduce stress, increase happiness, and put the world to rights.

[Donald Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant selection, beautifully produced. With so much poetry available for nothing on the web, this book reminds us why a great editor and a good publishing house can still make it worth buying hard copies.

[Smuel Mackereth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rich and rewarding trove of some really beautiful poetry, whilst some poets are given more space than necessary and some are perhaps neglected Ricks' compendium is a wonderful place to explore, to discover, and to feed on the complexity and elegance of human thought and expression.

[Ebookwormy1 · Rating 2 out of 5]

A classic. Not often read, but kept around anyway, if only to look up poetry referenced in other works.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dat ass emol en anstännegt Schoulbuch :)

[Joe Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must have for any poet lovers.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

.

[John Bohnert · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was rather disappointed by the poetry selections chosen.