Critical History of English Poetry

Sir Herbert Grierson was born in 1866. Educated at King’s College, Aberdeen, and Christ Church, Oxford, he was Professor of English Literature at Aberdeen University from 1894 to 1915, and at Edinburgh University from 1915 to 1935. His most famous publications include Metaphysical Poets: Donne to Butler and Cross Currents in the Literature of the Seventeenth Century. He died in 1960. James Cruickshank Smith was born in 1867, and educated at Edinburgh University and Trinity College, Oxford. He was Chief Inspector of Schools in Scotland from 1927 to 1932, received two honorary doctorates, and was acting Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh University in 1932-3. Among his works are several editions of Shakespeare’s plays and of Spenser’s poetry. He died in 1946.

• Prefatory Note 1 Anglo-Saxon Poetry2 Early Middle English Poetry 3 Chaucer, Gower and Langland4 English Poetry from Chaucer to Skelton5 Early Scottish Poetry6 The Tudor Renaissance7 Spenser, Sidney, and their Circle 8 Elizabethan Poetry9 The Jacobeans 10 Shakespeare’s Predecessors11 Shakespeare 12 Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and Successors in Drama13 The Carolines14 Milton 15 Cowley to Dryden 16 The Age of Pope and other Augustans17 Thomson to Cowper 18 Cowper 19 Crabbe20 The Revival of Scottish Poetry21 Burns22 The Revolutionary Age23 Blake 24 Wordsworth and Coleridge: Early Poems and Lyrical Ballads 25 Wordsworth and Coleridge: Early Poems and Lyrical Ballads 25 Wordsworth and Coleridge: Later Poems 26 Scott27 Byron28 Shelley 29 Keats 30 Landor to Tennyson 31 The Early Victorians, 1: Tennyson 32 The Early Victorians, 2: Robert Browning 33 The Early Victorians, 3: Mrs Browning and Others 34 Mid-Victorian Poetry, 1: Arnold, Clough, and Kingsley 35 Mid-Victorian Poetry, 2: The Pre-Raphaelite Group 36 Mid-Victorian Poetry, 3: Patmore, Thomson, and Other Minors37 Mid-Victorian Poetry, 4: Meredith and Hardy 38 The Nineties 39 Twentieth-century Poetry, 1: The Pre-War Years, 1901-14 40 Twentieth-century Poetry, 2: The War Years, 1914-18 41 Twentieth-century Poetry, 2: Between the Wars, 1919-39 A Select Bibliography Index