The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (Oxford Books of Verse) - Softcover

...almost everywhere you turn in Mr Ricks's selection you are likely to be struck by the scope of Victorian poetry, by its humour, musicality, and most of all its frank appeal to the feelings and emotional power.' Observer This is an anthology that serious people can take seriously. It is not a candle flame in a ruined garden and night, but a reliable searchlight.' Spectator It is a magnificent piece of imaginative editing, a book to give real excitement and pleasure.' The Times ...almost everywhere you turn in Mr Ricks's selection you are likely to be struck by the scope of Victorian poetry, by its humour, musicality, and most of all its frank appeal to the feelings and emotional power.' Observer This is an anthology that serious people can take seriously. It is not a candle flame in a ruined garden and night, but a reliable searchlight.' Spectator It is a magnificent piece of imaginative editing, a book to give real excitement and pleasure.' The Times ...almost everywhere you turn in Mr Ricks's selection you are likely to be struck by the scope of Victorian poetry, by its humour, musicality, and most of all its frank appeal to the feelings and emotional power.' Observer This is an anthology that serious people can take seriously. It is not a candle flame in a ruined garden and night, but a reliable searchlight.' Spectator It is a magnificent piece of imaginative editing, a book to give real excitement and pleasure.' The Times ...almost everywhere you turn in Mr Ricks's selection you are likely to be struck by the scope of Victorian poetry, by its humour, musicality, and most of all its frank appeal to the feelings and emotional power.' Observer This is an anthology that serious people can take seriously. It is not a candle flame in a ruined garden and night, but a reliable searchlight.' Spectator It is a magnificent piece of imaginative editing, a book to give real excitement and pleasure.' The Times

A great age of poetry speaks for itself in this 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.