The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1918

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Edward Thomas (from Collected Poems of Edward Thomas) . Mrs. Edward Thomas and Messrs. Faber & Faber, Ltd. A. E. Housman (from Last Poems and A Shropshire Lad): the literary executors, Messrs. Henry Holt, Inc., New York. Lord Tennyson (from Works of Alfred Tennyson) the author's representative; Messrs. Macmillan Co., Ltd , The Macmillan Co., New York. Edward Taylor -- John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester -- Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough -- Anne Finch -- Countess of Winchilsea -- Tom Brown -- Matthew Prior -- George Granville, Lord Lansdowne -- Jonathan Swift -- William Congreve -- Joseph Addison -- Isaac Watts -- Joseph Trapp -- George Berkeley -- John Gay -- Allan Ramsay -- Alexander Pope -- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu -- Charles Mordaunt, William Oldys -- Samuel Johnson -- William Shenstone -- Thomas Gray -- William Collins -- Mary Leapor -- Christopher Smart -- Frances Greville -- Jean Elliot -- Oliver Goldsmith -- William Cowper -- Anna Seward -- Robert Fergusson -- Lade Anne Lindsay -- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

The New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1950 is a poetry anthology edited by Helen Gardner, and published in New York and London in 1972 by Clarendon Press. It was intended as a replacement for the older Quiller-Couch Oxford Book of English Verse. Selections were largely restricted to British and Irish poets (with Ezra Pound being allowed a special status). Anthologies are the route by which young people find poets, and this one is full of good introductions to good poets.”–Helen Vendler, The New Republic Q's own characterization of his job as “to bring home and render so great a spoil [of poetry] compendiously ... as to serve those who already love poetry and to implant that love in some young minds not yet initiated,” places him squarely in his mentor's tradition as summarizer and transmitter of the nation's poetic taste. If Q then was following taste, where did it lead him? Did he produce an anthology giving us a unified array of poems which are, in those words of Shelley which Palgrave had quoted as The Golden Treasury's program, “episodes to that great Poem which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world”? Does his book embody that one great poem? And if so, what does it tell us about that one great mind?

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When The Oxford Book of English Verse by A. T. Quiller-Couch appeared in 1900, Punch recommended it as “a most useful book for those who, being not 'unaccustomed to public speaking' and loving to embellish their flow of language with quotations from poets whose works they have never read ... are only too grateful to any well-read collector placing so excellent a store as this at their service,” and predicted that because those who owned his anthology would be spared the tedious necessity of actually reading poetry, “many an after-dinner and learned society speaker will bless the name of this “Q. C."' Behind its deadpan humor, this statement tells us quite a bit about taste and the anthologist's relation to it in the world into which the Oxford Book was born: if the joke depends on the reality that few people read poetry, it equally depends on the pretense that everybody is supposed to, and it also implies a canon of poetry which one ought to read. Such had certainly been the case in the day of Q's mentor Francis Palgrave, who said in his preface to The Golden Treasury, the progenitor of Q’s Oxford book, that he “will regard as his fittest readers those who love poetry so well that he can offer them nothing not already known and valued,” which assumes there exists a body of verse valued by social consensus.

Care has been taken with the texts. But I have sometimes thought it consistent with the aim of the book to prefer the more beautiful to the better attested reading. I have often excised weak or superfluous stanzas when sure that excision would improve; and have not hesitated to extract a few stanzas from a long ​poem when persuaded that they could stand alone as a lyric. The apology for such experiments can only lie in their success: but the risk is one which, in my judgement, the anthologist ought to take. A few small corrections have been made, but only when they were quite obvious.BY favour of the Public, The Oxford Book of English Verse has held its own in request for close upon forty years. The editor would stand convicted of dullness indeed if in these years he had not learnt, revising his judgement, to regret some inclusions and omissions; of indolence, moreover, the industry of scholars having rescued to light meanwhile many gems long hidden away in libraries, miscellanies, even scrap-books. In this new edition, therefore, I have risked repairing the old structure with a stone here, a tile there, and hope to have left it as weather-proof as when it as first built. This is a chronological walk through English poetry and the effect of reading these poems by people long dead who had all the hopes and dreams and sorrows and cares as me was profound. I think Q was brilliant to end on this poem which exactly defines my feelings on reading this volume. To the President and Fellows and Scholars of Trinity College Oxford / a house of learning; ancient, liberal, humane, and my most kindly nurse" Mary Coleridge (from Poems): Sir Francis Newbolt and the executors of the late Sir Henry Newbolt; Messrs. Elkin Mathews.