The New Oxford Book

The New Oxford Book - Christopher Ricks

A great age of poetry speaks for itself in this anthology: the variety and power of Victorian verse, the innovation and creativity with which poets resisted the bad propensities of the era through which they lived.The great figures are of course strongly represented - Tennyson and Browning, Swinburne and Hopkins - but not so as to crowd out the less expected but equally rewarding facets of light verse and nonsense, of grotesque and protest. At long last justice is done to the poignant directness of 'the truevoice of feeling', from William Barnes and John Clare, through Emily Jane Bronte and Christina G. Rossetti, to Thomas Hardy.The New Oxford Book of Victorian Versebrings to life a great age of poetry which past generations have viewed with condescension because of its supposed prudery, sentimentality, and lack of irony. Christopher Ricks' selection of 560 poems written by 115 different poets offers our generation a wonderful opportunity to reevaluate the Victorians. Bringing together the best and most inspiring verse written between 1837 and 1901, this marvelous anthology presents inspiring selections by the great figures--Tennyson, Wordsworth, Browning, Swinburne, and Hopkins among them--as well as the less well-known, but equally rewarding, verse by William Barnes, Coventry Patmore, Elizabeth Siddal, and others. Demonstrating unprecedented respect for the integrity of the poems, Ricks uses excerpts only in cases where the poet provided distinct breaks in a work, and he also reproduces a number of longer masterpieces in their entirety. Readers will find this anthology a source of delight and surprise as they discover that the Victorians are not so very different from ourselves.