Publisher's Synopsis
The most comprehensive survey of English Verse available, covering seven centuries, from Chaucer to Heaney, and including longer poems - such as Paradise Lost and The Prelude - in their entirety.
Seven centuries of English Verse, attractively laid out and lightly annotated: from anonymous medieval lyrics to the finest contemporary poets, and also embracing ballads, dialect poems and important translations. Compiled by one of Britain's leading anthologists, this is the poetry collection for all the family.
From the Introduction by Harold Bloom: 'The full range of English poetry is extraordinary, both in its diversity and in its splendor.This anthology remarkably is able to suggest something of both that variety and that magnificence…And yet one might assert that the special excellence of the English tradition in poetry transcends the linguistic instrument. Whatever the theology or the metaphysics or the aesthetics of individual poets, there is an enduring capacity in most of the major figures for what Blake termed Vision. Vision, in this sense, is the gift of seeing the objects of sense
perception charged with a higher degree of spiritual intensity than normally is available to our sensibilities. Because, in their very different ways,
the English poets have had this impulse towards Vision, they have inspired generation after generation of readers to at least approach the threshold of transcendental possibilities.'
