The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900

Six hundred and fifty years of the English language's most beautiful songs, gathered into a single volume by the man who knew poetry as few have. Quiller-Couch spent decades curating what he called 'the best songs and sonnets in the language' - from the medieval sweetness of anonymous carols to Tennyson's aching Victorian elegies - and the result eclipsed all predecessors. Here is Chaucer singing in Middle English, Wyatt's restrained heartbreak, Shakespeare's sonnets, Milton's grand abstractions, Gray's graveyard poetry, Keats's desperate sensuality, and a hundred others whose lines have lodged in English-speaking minds for centuries. This is not a textbook. It is a companion for a lifetime, the book soldiers carried in their packs through two world wars, the volume generations turned to when they needed to remember what language could do at its most precise and alchemical. For anyone who has ever wanted to own the tradition.