Five-minute digest
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.
Top 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.
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.
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.
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.