Oxford Books of Verse – serie

The debts that English poetry owes to the Classics are massive and various. But they have been richly repaid by the astonishingly inventive tradition of translation to which some of the greatest poets in the English language have contributed, including Chaucer and Jonson, Dryden and Pope, Tennyson and Ezra PoundThis anthology presents the wealth of this living tradition as it has never been seen before, ranging from King Alfred to contemporary poets such as Ted Hughes, and from North America to Ireland and Scotland. It offers a vast array of responses to the song, verse, and drama of ancient Greece and Rome, and to poets themselves as varied as Homer, Sappho, and Euripides; Virgil, Ovid, and Juvenal. Organized by classical author and text, it runs from the epics of Homer to the late antique world where Greek and Latin writing both faced an emerging Christian culture, and juxtaposes English versions, sometimes of the same passage or poem, to dramatize the endless re-animation of one great poetic tradition in and through another.

This anthology presents the Irish tradition as a unity: verse in Irish and English, usually regarded separately, are shown as elements in a shared and often painful history. The selection is in three parts: it begins with earliest, pre-Christian times and the first poetry in English from the fourteenth century; moves on to Irish bardic poetry and English poetry in the era of Swift and Goldsmith; and closes with nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets, from Davis, Mangan, Yeats, and Ferguson to Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney.

Like its predecessor, Iona and Peter Opie's Oxford Book of Children's Verse, this is an anthology of poetry written for children. It begins in the eighteenth century and ends in 1995, with the emphasis on modern work, and the explosion of talent that has emerged on both sides of the Atlantic in the last 25 years. This is a book bursting with vitality and variety: over 350 poems by more than 200 poets, in which narrative poems, concrete verse and performance poetry with poems of the classroom and playground. Acute observation and language new-made inform all these poems, which represent the ethnic and cultural diversity of contemporary writing for children ranging from African American and Aborigine to Caribbean/Black British and New Zealand and Canadian. Familiar names such as Edward Lear, Christina Rossetti, Rudyard Kipling and A. A. Milne happily lead on to new generations: Charles Causley, Ted Hughes, Roger McGough, Allan Ahlberg, Jackie Kay and many more. The result is an exuberant anthology whose contents speak with humour, passion, and insight to the child reader: it is a pudding packed with plums.

In the tradition of Iona and Peter Opie's Oxford Book of Children's Verse comes this anthology by the award-winning poet and children's book author Donald Hall. Bringing together "poems written for children and also poems written for anybody which children have enjoyed," the book includes anonymous works, ballads, and recitation pieces, beginning with the Calvinist verses of the seventeenth century.Hall has collected poems from Sunday School magazines,Christmas annuals for children, and children's periodicals such as St. Nicholas and Youth's Companion. Many marvelous writers, some no longer remembered, wrote almost every month for these nineteenthand twentieth century publications. In addition to the expected names of Longfellow and Whittier, we find Sarah Josepha Hale ("Mary Had a Little Lamb"), Mary Mapes Dodge (creator of Hans Brinker), and Palmer Cox (with his marvelous Brownies). Twentieth century authors abound: Ogden Nash, T.S. Eliot, John Updike, Theodore Roethke, to name just a few. The book concludes with the fabulous nonsense of present-day writers like Shel Silverstein and Nancy Willard.About theEditor:Donald Hall's many books include The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes, Kicking the Leaves, and Ox-Cart Man, which won the Caldecott Medal for children'sliterature.

Compiled by the award-winning poet and author of children's books, Donald Hall, this delightful anthology follows in the tradition of Iona and Peter Opie's classic Oxford Book of Children's Verse. Hall brings together poems written specifically for children and also those written for anyone and enjoyed by children and adults alike. He presents over two hundred fifty poems written by over one hundred different American poets--including anonymous works, ballads, and recitation pieces--that range from the Calvinist verses of the seventeenth century to the fabulous nonsense poems of the present.Drawing on literally thousands of sources--including Sunday School magazines, Christmas annuals for children, and such wonderful children's periodicals as St. Nicholas and Youth's Companion--Hall gives the modern reader a rich sampling of many poems never before anthologized. He includes everyone's favorites, from Clement Clarke Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (a.k.a. "The Night Before Christmas") to the classic lines of Longfellow and Whittier. Along with Sarah Josepha Hale's famous poem, "Mary's Lamb," we find poetry by Emily Dickinson, Mary Mapes Dodge, Palmer Cox, Sarah Orne Jewett, Laura E. Richards, and Gelett Burgess. He also covers the twentieth-century with verse by T.S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Ogden Nash, Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), and Randall Jarrell, just to name a few. Hall concludes with the poetry of present-day writers such as Shel Silverstein and Nancy Willard.A testament to a captivating tradition in American literature, this anthology will encourage many hours of nostalgic browsing and reading aloud to children.

This book presents 290 representative selections of religious and secular Latin poetry from the period A.D. 300-1300. It includes not only famous hymns and sequences, but also selections from epic poetry and a large number of secular lyrics from various manuscript collections.

The New Oxford Book of English Verse is now firmly established as a classic anthology of English poetry. Chosen by the distinguished scholar and critic, Dame Helen Gardner, the book makes available in one volume the full range and variety of English non-dramatic verse. Dame Helen Gardner reflected the critical consensus of the day in broadening her choices beyond those of Quiller-Couch's lyrical tastes, and the anthology balances poems that deal with public events and historic occasions with poems of private life, and religious, moral or political verse with satire and light verse. All the major poets are fully represented, and there are also superb works by lesser known poets, and many surprises among the favourites.