Paul Keegan’s The Penguin Book of English Verse is a varied anthology containing a variety of chronologically ordered poems dating from early 14th Century to late 20th Century. This is a delightful way of presenting the collection as it provides the reader with something of a history of English verse, enabling one to see how both our language and the poem have developed over the centuries.

The collection contains a wide range of poems including extracts from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and nonsense poems such as those of Edward Lear, with the result that the book can be enjoyed both by serious and lighter readers of poetry.

The book ought to be commended for its ease of use with an index of poets, first lines and titles which make it easy to locate a particular poem, and also for the detailed footnotes which certainly helped my understanding of some of the earlier poems where Middle English is abundant. It could however be criticised for a disappointing lack of contextual information, unusual for Penguin Classics, and similarly, its preface which I found to be somewhat vague.

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use.
If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing BlogaPenguinClassicFeedback@penguin.co.uk

Feed

There are 0 comments on this review