Thousand Years of English Poetry: An Anthology

The English language, with its rich vocabulary and unique grammar, has always been a fertile tool for the poetic imagination. In this illustrated volume, the great poets of the English tongue give voice to a startling range of perceptions and emotions, tackling subjects both earthly and divine, tragic and comic, epic and everyday. Herrick and Marvell urge their lady loves to stop wasting precious time on maidenly virtue, while Oscar Wilde laments a relationship that has ended in bitterness. Gerard Manley Hopkins thanks God for dappled things, Shelley evokes the heavenly qualities of the skylark and Keats the melancholy of autumn. Even the First World War Poets, united in tragedy, offer the contrast between Rupert Brooke's poignant homesickness for Grantchester and Wilfred Owen's anger at men dying like cattle. All human experience is dealt with in this wide selection of verse through the centuries from Langland and Chaucer to Heaney and Hughes. A perfect volume for both newcomers to poetry and lifelong lovers of verse.