Thousand Years of English Poetry: An Anthology edited by Andrew Pagett

This beautifully illustrated book celebrates poetry in the English language from the earliest times to the present day. It is a body of work of breathtaking diversity, whose subject matter comprises the divine and the earthy, the tragic and the comic, the epic and the day-to-day. Herrick and Marvell urge their ladyloves to stop wasting precious time on maidenly virtue, while Oscar Wilde laments a relationship that has ended in bitterness. Gerard Manley Hopkins chooses to thank God for dappled things; Shelley to evoke the heavenly qualities of the skylark and Keats the melancholy of autumn. Even the First World War poets, united in tragedy, offer the contrast between Rupert Brooke's poignant homesickness for Grantchester and Wilfred Owen's bitterness at men dying like cattle. English has the richest vocabulary of any language in the western world, and the poets in this collection have taken full advantage of that fact. All human life -- and much more -- is here, and it is depicted by some of the most talented writers ever to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard on both sides of the Atlantic