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

Christopher Rick's anthology succeeds triumphantly. (The Observer)

(Christopher Ricks) has done for Victorian poetry what Sir John Betjeman did for Victorian architecture. He has made it live again. (The Times)

A formidable volume. (Irish Times)

A masterly survey of a gigantic age, this anthology is indispensable. (Oxford Times)

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.