Palgrave's Golden Treasury: From Shakespeare to the Present

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Among the moderns: Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and Auden have long been personal favorites, but until now I hadn’t paid any attention to the poems of Thomas Hardy, in spite of the fact that he’s one of my favorite novelists (and the urging of one of my best friends, whose taste I trust). The selection included here is seriously good — right up there with Robert Graves.

Read it so many time only to discover more and more beauty and meanings.It is indeed a wonderful collection of poems! Thank you Hirdesh for recommending this book to me. I love it. This is one of those books which I bought just because I had to. The story goes something like this. I was finding a particular book for my syllabus and after a long stroll down College Street I landed upon this miniature old book at a very nominal cost. The shopkeeper told me it had all the poetries that I was looking for and a lot many that I might like. I never got to the other lot many. After graduating I kept it aside and never looked on it until now. My love for poetry was only new then and I was still basking in the romantics like Shelley and Wordsworth. It was only over the years that I realised that poetry was not just romantic, it was beautiful in all its modernity, classics, old age, natural rhythm and abstract nature. So what did I learn from reading the entire collection in sequence? What follows is strictly personal opinion. I already knew Shakespeare was great. No surprise there, but that Marlowe fellow wasn’t so bad either. My close attention to Milton was rewarded, especially in “Il Penseroso,” a seriously great poem. Among the Romantics, I found I don’t care if I ever read another poem by Walter Scott. I liked Shelley more than Keats and much more than Byron; until now, I had always thought of them as a single, three-headed poetic hydra. Wordsworth is generously represented, too much so for the sake of his reputation — there’s a lot of chaff there. Ditto for Tennyson. I get it — he’s a master of the depiction of nature, but to what purpose? Browning is a different matter. There’s something strange about his poems; I’m curious to continue exploring. The theme of National Poetry Day...is fresh voices, but there's an opportunity to celebrate some old ones, too. Palgrave, Macmillan's newly renamed academic list, is reissuing a facsimile edition of the book from which the list takes its name, Palgrave's Golden Treasury. First published in 1861 at the suggestion of Tennyson, then Poet Laureate, the anthology had sold 650,000 copies by 1939. The reissue has a foreword by the present Laureate, Andrew Motion.' - The Literator, The Independent The authors are all British, although Press stretches the criterium both ways; he includes both T. S. Eliot, an American who took on British citizenship, and W. H. Auden, an Englishman with an American passport.Another benefit of reading a well-selected anthology is the discovery of writers I hadn’t heard of before. I’ve noted several for further study. The Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics is a popular anthology of English poetry, originally selected for publication by Francis Turner Palgrave in 1861. [1] It was considerably revised, with input from Tennyson, about three decades later. Palgrave excluded all poems by poets then still alive. William Blake – Lord Byron – Thomas Campbell – Hartley Coleridge – Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Allan Cunningham – Thomas Hood – John Keats – Charles Lamb – Mary Lamb – H. F. Lyte – Thomas Moore – Percy Bysshe Shelley – Sir Walter Scott – Robert Southey – Charles Wolfe – William Wordsworth Book V as selected by Laurence Binyon [ edit ] This five-book version is republished as a Penguin Popular Classic The first four books bear the stamp of the personality of Palgrave. This sets it apart from many anthologies, the product of editorial teams and aimed for use as textbooks in university courses. No doubt Palgrave discussed his selections with his close friend Tennyson (dedicatee of the first edition) and others, but these are his choices. The result, if you’re at all in tune with his sympathies, is a handy compendium. For the most part, Palgrave limits himself to lyrical poems, although he admits that a few of his choices could also be grouped among narrative or dramatic poetry.

Our longtime neighbor and friend Ursula was probably the greatest lover of books I ever met. Gracious and friendly, frank and unpretentious, she read constantly and widely right up until she passed away at 97. In her retirement she worked part time for close to 20 years at the University of Michigan Conservation and Book Repair Lab. William Alexander, 1st Earl of Stirling – Richard Barnefield – Thomas Campion – Samuel Daniel – Thomas Dekker – Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford – Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex – John Donne – Michael Drayton – William Drummond – W. Drummond of Hawthornden – Thomas Heywood – Thomas Lodge – John Lylye – Christopher Marlowe – Thomas Nashe – William Shakespeare – Sir Philip Sidney – Edmund Spenser – The Shepherd Tonie – Joshua Sylvester – John Webster – Sir Thomas Wyatt Book II (Palgrave) [ edit ]An important edition was edited by Cecil Day-Lewis, later Poet laureate. It contained 229 Additional Poems, with Books I-IV, including in this case a number of American poets.