Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic Poetry Collection, 6 Aug 2000
By A Customer
Copies of Palgrave's Golden Treasury ought to be placed in every schoolroom, in every office, in every waiting room. This classic collection of poems written in the english language ranges from before Shakespeare to the First World War poets. It is as fresh now as when I first discovered the volume on my grandfather's bookshelves. This book brightens drab surroundings, enlightens dull moments, and brings beauty and calm into our bustling lives.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
John Press's edition of Palgrave, 27 Dec 2001
By A Customer
Palgrave's Golden Treasury was an extraordinarily influential collection of poems: its choices of poems are reflected in many of the anthologies compiled at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. If you were to ask non-poets to define what poetry was, their answers would probably be in line with Palgrave's: poetry (or at least the poetry that he was interested in) was lyric poetry -- concerned with feelings rather than narrative, using an elevated rather than demotic diction, and aiming for a musical rather than a spoken effect. His anthology starts with the Elizabethans, include a lot of Milton's shorter poems (Milton being the prime example in English of the "poetical" poet, using elevated language and preferring a musical to a spoken use of language), and culminates in the longest section, which is devoted to the Romantics: mainly Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats.Palgrave's anthology therefore appeals to two types of people: those people who agree with him in a liking for "poetic" poetry; and those who are interested in finding out what poems this view of poetry values. This edition presents the reader with all of Palgrave's anthology, with a supplemental section by John Press, bringing the anthology up to the present day. Unusually, this additional section is itself a very interesting anthology, containing an obviously personal choice of poems, rather than an imitation of other Twentieth Century anthologies. Press's criteria for choosing poems are obviously nothing like Palgave's: the later anthologist is attracted to a language that aims to sound spoken rather than elevated, to poems that are responding to domestic life rather than elevated feelings, to quiet statement rather than sounding rhetoric. With Palgrave's and Press's selections together, a reader has two, complimentary, views of poetry: one that could be taken as the epitome of Late Victorian taste, the other of Late Modern taste. In both cases the conception of poetry is supported by a persuasive choice of poems.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful Anthology, 10 April 2009
This is a beautifully presented and wonderfully crafted collection of all the greatest English poets. In this book you are not only treated to the finest works of the classic poets, such as Milton, Shelley, and Keats but the work progresses through the eras of Auden, Larkin, and ending with the more modern carol Ann Duffy.
This is a fine anthology and the 6th edition provides an invaluable update to the series.
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