The Oxford Book of English Verse

Summary

The Oxford Book of English Verse edited by Christopher Ricks and published by Oxford University Press in 1999 is the third major anthology to carry that title. Arthur Quiller-Couch compiled the first in 1900, covering 1250 to 1900, and revised it in 1939; Helen Gardner replaced it in 1972 with The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1950. Ricks's volume was meant to serve readers at the end of the twentieth century, and it carries the authority of a critic best known for close attention to the sound, grammar and moral weight of individual lines: the author of Milton's Grand Style, Keats and Embarrassment and T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, and editor of Tennyson. Like its predecessors, the book is arranged broadly by chronology, so that a reader moving through it travels from anonymous medieval lyrics through Chaucer, the Tudor and Elizabethan poets, Shakespeare, Donne and Herbert, Milton, Dryden and Pope, the Romantics, the Victorians and into the twentieth century. Reviewers noticed Ricks's willingness to include passages from long poems rather than only complete short lyrics, and to admit verse translations into the English tradition; teachers should consult the volume itself for its exact range, its treatment of American and other non-English poets in English, and the last birth-year it reaches, since this record does not reproduce the table of contents. An anthology of this kind is itself an argument. Every inclusion says that a poem belongs to the shared memory of the language, and every omission, ordering and choice of extract shapes what a student thinks English poetry is. Quiller-Couch's book favoured the lyrical and the consoling and was carried by soldiers and schoolchildren for decades; Gardner's added more of the seventeenth century and the moderns; Ricks's selection reflects a critic who prizes exactness and is wary of the merely pleasant. Comparing editions is a useful way to show students that a canon is formed by judgment exercised over time, not handed down untouched. The volume remains in copyright as a compilation, and its selection, arrangement and editorial notes belong to the editor and publisher even where individual poems are centuries old. This library therefore gives no quotations from it and stores no text. For free classroom reading, many of the older poems it contains are available in public-domain editions, and this library's own poem and collection pages, such as Gray's Elegy, Lyrical Ballads, the Sonnets and Herbert's The Collar, can be used alongside a borrowed or purchased copy. A classical Christian teacher may find the anthology most useful as a map for planning a survey of English verse, a source for memory work, and a model of what it means to judge poems by attention to their words.

Plot or Argument

• Three Oxford Books in one century

  Quiller-Couch's 1900 anthology (revised 1939) set the pattern of a chronological, single-volume survey; Helen Gardner's New Oxford Book of 1972 renewed it; Ricks's 1999 edition is the third full remaking under OUP's imprint and the one now in print.

• From medieval lyric to the twentieth century

  The book is organized broadly by chronology, so that reading straight through gives a running history of English poetic forms: song and ballad, sonnet, Metaphysical lyric, heroic couplet, blank-verse meditation, Romantic ode, Victorian monologue and modern free verse.

• An editor's principles of choice

  Ricks's selection reflects his criticism: attention to the precise word, interest in passages from longer poems and in translation as part of English verse, and suspicion of easy sentiment. These principles make the anthology an argument about what deserves memory.

• Compilation copyright and classroom use

  Older poems in the book are public domain, but the selection, arrangement and apparatus are not. Teachers can plan with the volume, buy or borrow it for students, and use public-domain editions of individual poems for free handouts.

Characters

• Christopher Ricks, editor

  British critic born in 1933, known for close reading of Milton, Keats, Tennyson, Eliot and Bob Dylan; later Oxford Professor of Poetry.

• Arthur Quiller-Couch, editor of the first Oxford Book (1900, rev. 1939)

  Cornish novelist and Cambridge professor whose anthology shaped English school and wartime reading for half a century.

• Helen Gardner, editor of The New Oxford Book of English Verse (1972)

  Oxford scholar of Donne and the Metaphysical poets whose anthology replaced Quiller-Couch's and preceded Ricks's.

Lessons

• Choosing is judging

  An anthology looks like a neutral container, but every Oxford Book has been an act of judgment by one editor. Comparing Quiller-Couch, Gardner and Ricks shows students how taste, scholarship and convictions shape what a generation calls English poetry. The point is not suspicion of editors but the habit of asking on what grounds a poem is kept.

  • Choose one poet and find how many poems each Oxford Book gives him or her (using library copies). What might explain the difference?
  • What should count most in admitting a poem: beauty, influence, truth, popularity or difficulty?
  • How would you defend the inclusion of a poem you dislike?

• The whole poem and the excerpt

  Ricks's readiness to print passages from long poems raises a practical classroom question. An excerpt from Paradise Lost or The Prelude can open a great work to a student, but it can also be mistaken for the whole. Students learn to ask what is gained and lost when a passage is lifted from its setting.

  • Read a famous passage from a long poem in this library, then the pages around it. Does the context change its meaning?
  • When is a short extract a fair representative of a long work?
  • Why might an anthologist prefer a passage over a complete lesser poem?

• Old poems, new rights

  Many poems in the anthology are centuries old and free for anyone to print, yet the book as a compilation remains protected. Learning the difference teaches honest use of other people's labour and points students to lawful public-domain sources for the poems themselves.

  • What exactly does an editor create when he selects and arranges old poems?
  • Why is it right to buy or borrow an edited anthology even when the poems are free?
  • Where in this library could you find a free text of a poem you meet in the Ricks volume?

• A memory canon for a school

  A thick anthology can serve as a quarry for memory work: short lyrics, sonnets and hymns that students learn by heart and carry for life. Building a school list from a major anthology asks teachers to weigh beauty, truth, difficulty and the spread of centuries, and to include the devotional poetry that runs through the English tradition from medieval lyrics to Herbert and Hopkins.

  • Propose five poems for a ninth-grade memory list and give one reason for each.
  • Should a Christian school's list include poems whose authors did not share its faith? Why?
  • What does memorizing a poem allow that reading it cannot?

Context

Single-volume poetry anthologies have shaped English literary education since Francis Turner Palgrave's The Golden Treasury (1861). Oxford University Press's Oxford Book of English Verse became the most authoritative of these in the twentieth century and lent its name to a long series of Oxford Books on other subjects and languages.

Composition

Christopher Ricks prepared the anthology for Oxford University Press, which published it in 1999 as the successor to Helen Gardner's 1972 New Oxford Book of English Verse. Ricks was then a professor at Boston University after posts at Oxford, Bristol and Cambridge. His selection, arrangement, introduction and notes are his own and are distinct from both earlier Oxford Books.

Reception

Reviewers welcomed the authority of the selection and debated its principles, as reviewers of every Oxford Book have done; discussion focused on proportions between centuries, the place of extracts and translations, and the treatment of recent poetry. It remains a standard reference anthology for teachers and general readers. Details of individual reviews are not summarized here.

Comparisons

• The Metaphysical Poets

  Helen Gardner, who edited the Oxford Book that Ricks's replaced, also made this anthology of seventeenth-century poets; it shows on a smaller scale how an editor's scholarship defines a period.

• Lyrical Ballads

  Wordsworth and Coleridge's 1798 collection was a manifesto against the poetic diction of its age; a general anthology absorbs such revolutions into a continuous story, and students can ask what is lost when they become one chapter among many.

• Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

  Gray's Elegy is the kind of poem every Oxford Book has included; reading it in a public-domain text here shows how a fixture of the canon earns its place by craftsmanship and moral seriousness.

• Sonnets

  Anthologies usually print a handful of the Sonnets out of sequence; reading the whole sequence in this library tests whether a few chosen sonnets represent Shakespeare fairly.

• The Complete Poems

  Whitman's free-verse democracy stands at the edge of the English tradition an Oxford Book surveys; comparing him with the British poets of his century shows students what an anthology's national boundaries include or set aside.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Notice how the chronological order lets you hear English verse change, from medieval song to modern free verse.
• When a poem is printed as an extract, ask what comes before and after it in the full work.
• Look for poems that answer each other across centuries on the same subject, such as death, love or the seasons.
• Mark devotional poems and ask how faith shapes their form as well as their content.

Key terms and names

Anthology

From a Greek word for a gathering of flowers: a selection of poems by many authors chosen by an editor.

Canon

The body of works a tradition treats as central and keeps teaching; formed by judgment over generations.

Excerpt

A passage taken from a longer work and printed on its own.

Compilation copyright

Legal protection for an editor's selection and arrangement, separate from the rights in the individual poems.

Prosody

The study of metre, rhythm and sound patterns in verse.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Which three editors have made an Oxford Book of English Verse, and in which years did their anthologies appear?
2. Comprehension Why does this library give no quotations from Ricks's anthology even though many of its poems are centuries old?
3. Interpretation What can you infer about an editor's values from the poems he includes from one century compared with another?
4. Interpretation How does reading a poem in an anthology, between its neighbours, differ from reading it in the poet's own collection?
5. Big Question Who should decide which poems a school asks students to memorize, and by what standards?
6. Big Question Does a tradition of poetry belong to the people who keep reading it, to the poets, or to the editors who select it?

Faith Connections

• Philippians 4:8 (Scripture)

  Paul's list of things true, honourable, lovely and of good report offers a standard for choosing which poems a school sets before students.

• Psalm 45:1 (Scripture)

  The psalmist's heart 'overflowing' with a goodly matter and his tongue as the pen of a ready writer gives a biblical picture of poetry as crafted praise, a strand that runs through English devotional verse.

• Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy (Great Conversation)

  Sidney argued that poetry delights and teaches at once, a claim worth testing against the range of poems in any major anthology.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: A major anthology implicitly argues that certain poems, chosen by a qualified judge, form the shared memory of a language; its authority rests on the quality of that judgment and can be examined by comparing it with other editors' choices.

Rhetorical device: juxtaposition. Chronological arrangement sets a medieval lyric beside a Renaissance sonnet on the same subject, so that a reader hears change in diction and form without an essay explaining it.

Debate: Resolved: that a school poetry anthology should prefer complete short poems to excerpts from long ones.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Choose one poem that has appeared in every Oxford Book of English Verse and explain, from close reading, why three different editors in three generations kept it.

Comparison with The Metaphysical Poets: Compare how Helen Gardner's anthology of seventeenth-century poets and a general Oxford Book represent Donne or Herbert, and judge which gives a student the truer picture.

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Using library copies, compare how Quiller-Couch, Gardner and Ricks represent one poet such as Herbert or Tennyson, and present the findings as a chart with a one-paragraph interpretation.

• Essay

  Argue for or against including excerpts from long poems in a school anthology, using one passage from Paradise Lost or The Prelude as your test case.

• Poetry

  Write a short poem in a form you meet while reading English verse chronologically, such as a sonnet, a ballad stanza or heroic couplets, and explain the form's demands.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation between Quiller-Couch and Ricks about whether an anthology should console its readers or sharpen them.

• Classroom

  Build a class anthology of twelve public-domain poems from this library, write a two-page introduction defending the selection, and compare your principles with those of a published Oxford Book.

Further Reading

• The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900, Arthur Quiller-Couch (editor)

  The first Oxford Book (1900); the original edition is public domain in many jurisdictions, but check rights for the 1939 revision.

• The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1950, Helen Gardner (editor)

  The 1972 anthology that Ricks's edition replaced.

• The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, Francis Turner Palgrave (editor)

  Victorian anthology (1861) that set many of the habits later Oxford Books inherited; public domain.

• Milton's Grand Style, Christopher Ricks

  Ricks's 1963 study, a good introduction to the close reading that informs his choices.

• The Force of Poetry, Christopher Ricks

  Collection of essays on English poets that displays his critical principles.