Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats

Front Cover
Random House Publishing Group, Oct 3, 1992 - Poetry - 608 pages
Uniquely comprehensive...highly readable...the definitive collection of classic lyric poetry.

From Shakespeare's wise music to Marvell's profundity and wit...from the Romantics' passionate view of man and woman and nature to twentieth-centur poets' confused searching, this outstanding one-volume collection brings us the profound, soul-nourishing experience of great poetry.

Brilliantly selected and arranged by renowned literary masters Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine, the poems here reflect the genius of six centuries of poets.  It is the finest anthology of lyric poetry ever published.

"Truth" by Geoffrey Chaucer
"Ophelia's Song" by William Shakespeare
"The Canonization" by John Donne
"To Heaven" by Ben Jonson
"Ode on Solitude" by Alexander Pope
"The Tyger" by William Blake
"The Solitary Reaper" by William Wordsworth
"Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats
"God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins
"Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats

and more than ninety additional classic poems.

From inside the book

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
6
Section 3
7
Section 4
44
Section 5
75
Section 6
107
Section 7
109
Section 8
187
Section 16
298
Section 17
302
Section 18
309
Section 19
320
Section 20
328
Section 21
330
Section 22
331
Section 23
352

Section 9
220
Section 10
252
Section 11
255
Section 12
270
Section 13
279
Section 14
288
Section 15
292
Section 24
376
Section 25
434
Section 26
474
Section 27
490
Section 28
533
Section 29
555
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1992)

Robert Penn Warren taught English at Yale University and was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and one for poetry, and of the National Book Award for poetry. He was the author, with Cleanth Brooks, of Understanding Fiction, and of the novels All the King’s Men, World Enough and Time, Band of Angels, and Flood, as well as many other works of fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. He died in 1989.

Albert Erskine was a vice president and executive editor at Random House in New York. He was also on the staff of The Southern Review and was associated with the Louisiana State University Press. He died in 1993.

Bibliographic information