The Penguin Book of English Verse

Összefoglaló

This anthology contains the work of one- hundred and fifty English poets from Wyatt to Dylan Thomas. It contains so far as I can tell the lion's share of all those who have been generally considered to make a significant contribution to English lyrical poetry. It does not include dramatic poetry and so its selection of Shakespeare's work is largely confined to the Sonnets.
In many cases it is possible to quarrel with the selections made by the editor. I object to the way 'Tintern Abbey' and 'The Intimations Ode' of Wordsworth were excerpted from. Most anthologies of English poetry contain these two poems complete. They are after all two of the greatest pieces of English contemplative poetry.
I also believe that certain poets should have been given more space. One poem for Wallace Stevens is not enough. The Whitman selection is confined to 'When Lilacs in the Dooryard Last Bloomed' admittedly a large poem and one of his most important but there is so much other vital Whitman which could have been included here. So too with Emily Dickinson, suggesting that the Americans have been a bit short- changed.
I above all object to the editor's inclusion of a couple of anti- Semitic lines from Eliot.Eliot's anti- Semitism has been called 'mild' but these lines have in them a vileness and contempt which I sense to be murderous. Perhaps there is after all 'moral and human value' which transcends the 'aesthetic'. I in any case found these two lines marred the whole taste of the anthology for me.
There are many great and much beloved poems here. Milton's 'Lycidas' and 'On His Blindness' 'Hopkins' Thou art Indeed Just Lord', Dylan Thomas 'Fern Hill' Yeats 'Byzantium' Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan'poems which every reader of English poetry should know- poems which have been reprinted in many anthologies.