Poets Of The English Language (Five-Volume Set)
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket - cloth/board in good condition
Pages: Yellowed
Few literary collections have achieved the canonical sweep and intellectual ambition of Poets of the English Language, the landmark five-volume anthology edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson. Spanning six centuries of verse — from William Langland's medieval allegories to the modernist innovations of W.B. Yeats — this magisterial set chronicles the full arc of English-language poetry, presenting each era's defining voices within their historical and cultural contexts. Organised chronologically across its volumes, the anthology moves from the rich, alliterative traditions of Langland and Spenser, through the Renaissance brilliance of Marlowe and Marvell, into the Augustan wit of Milton and Goldsmith, before arriving at the Romantic upheaval of Blake and Poe, and culminating in the Victorian and early modernist transformations of Tennyson and Yeats. What distinguishes this collection is the authority and discernment that Auden — himself one of the twentieth century's great poets — brings to the curation and commentary, offering readers not merely a compendium of verse but a deeply argued vision of the English literary tradition. Alongside Pearson's scholarly rigour, the selection illuminates the continuities and ruptures that have shaped poetic form and sensibility across the ages, making the set an indispensable resource for both the serious student and the passionate reader of poetry. For anyone who wishes to understand how the English poetic imagination developed from its earliest roots to the cusp of high modernism, this collection presents an invitation that is impossible to refuse.
Author: W.H. Auden & Norman Holmes Pearson
Format: Hardback
Genre: Poetry
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket - cloth/board in good condition
Pages: Yellowed
Few literary collections have achieved the canonical sweep and intellectual ambition of Poets of the English Language, the landmark five-volume anthology edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson. Spanning six centuries of verse — from William Langland's medieval allegories to the modernist innovations of W.B. Yeats — this magisterial set chronicles the full arc of English-language poetry, presenting each era's defining voices within their historical and cultural contexts. Organised chronologically across its volumes, the anthology moves from the rich, alliterative traditions of Langland and Spenser, through the Renaissance brilliance of Marlowe and Marvell, into the Augustan wit of Milton and Goldsmith, before arriving at the Romantic upheaval of Blake and Poe, and culminating in the Victorian and early modernist transformations of Tennyson and Yeats. What distinguishes this collection is the authority and discernment that Auden — himself one of the twentieth century's great poets — brings to the curation and commentary, offering readers not merely a compendium of verse but a deeply argued vision of the English literary tradition. Alongside Pearson's scholarly rigour, the selection illuminates the continuities and ruptures that have shaped poetic form and sensibility across the ages, making the set an indispensable resource for both the serious student and the passionate reader of poetry. For anyone who wishes to understand how the English poetic imagination developed from its earliest roots to the cusp of high modernism, this collection presents an invitation that is impossible to refuse.