"An Anthology of English Literature" is the first attempt for more than forty years to compile the most important literary texts of the English language for the Polish reader. The three-volume set shoud serve as a collection addressed to students of English departments and teacher training colleges as well as all other schools where courses in the history of English literature are taught. The selection was made on the basis of English and American anthologies as well as reading lists from polish Departments of English. Each of the texts selected here is either presented in other anthologies or included in the reading lists. The authors' assumption was to provide such a selection which would allow a complete course of history of literature with the use of one book except for larger works of fiction. At the same time, the collection was meant to allow a widening of the scope of the reading lists either by private reading or by inclusion of new positions to the already existing lists. The selection of modern poetry included in the third volume should also make it a valuable help for any advanced courses of English. Naturally, evrybody interested in English literature and language will find it a valuable source of the most interesting and most valuable works of the literature from its beginnings to the works of our contemporaries in the original version.