15 Poets. (Humphrey Milford. Oxford University Press. 6s.)
IN spite of the preface, which explains : " It is hoped that Fifteen Poets will serve as a link between the normal type Of anthology, in which a large number of poets are each repre- sented by a small amount of verse, and the ' Complete Works of the poets," it is a little difficult to see the use of this volume. The fifteen poets are Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Cowper,. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Arnold; each is represented by about r,000 lines of sometimes rather flatly chosen verse, and there are short introductions of about four pages by such distinguished writers as C. S. Lewis, Bonamy Dobree, W. H. Auden, Edmund Blunden, and Louis MacNeice. You can hardly say anYtiling very fresh about a poet in four pages, and the older critics me their space to better advantage than the younger. Auden should not have attempted to combine biography and criticism in that space—the result is gossip writing.
Previous page
