The Oxford Library of English Poetry (1988)

Second-Hand (Hardcover & boxed)

Excellent condition

Volumes 1, 2 & 3

THE true poet, said W.H.Auden, is like a valley cheese: local, but prized elsewhere. This three-volume anthology celebrates four centuries of English poetry, from the Elizabethan era to the present day.

Representing this tradition of unfailing richness and variety are all the great and familiar names - Shakespeare (this selection includes many extracts from the plays as well as the non-dramatic poetry), Donne, Marvell, Dryden, Pope, Keats, Wordsworth, Browning, Eliot, Auden, as well as poets writing today such as Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.

But many of the less well-known poets are here, too, adding their thrust to the mainstream, often providing interesting exceptions to what has become the conventional view of the poetry of their age. The result is a rich and many-coloured tapestry of the art that has been most successfully practised in Britain and Ireland, in all its depth, diversity, and energy.

John Wain is a professional writer who has published some twenty-five books in the last twenty-five years. Poet, novelist, short story writer, critic, dramatist, biographer, he has published eight volumes of his own verse, a number of anthologies, and many critical studies of poetry. He was Oxford Professor of Poetry 1973-8.