The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse

Christopher Ricks's celebrated anthology prsents a wonderfully varied collection of Victorian poetry, with 560 poems by 115 authors. With most poems given in their entirety, this is a lively and exciting anthology of Victorian verse selected by an expert in the field.

---

A great age of poetry speaks for itself in Christopher Ricks's celebrated anthology: the variety and power of Victorian verse, the innovation and creativity with which poets resisted the bad propensities of the era through which they lived.

The great figures are of course strongly represented - Tennyson and Browning, Swinburne and Hopkins - but not so as to crowd out the less expected but equally rewarding facets of light verse and nonsense, of grotesque and protest. At long last justice is done to the poignant directness of 'the true voice of feeling', from William Barnes and John Clare, through Emily Jane Bronte and Christina G. Rossetti, to Thomas Hardy.