This collection includes over seven centuries of English poetry, selected and introduced by Christopher Ricks, whom Auden described as "exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding." The Oxford Book of English Verse, created in 1900 by Arthur Quiller-Couch and reselected in 1972 by Helen Gardner, has established itself as the premier anthology of English poetry: capacious in duration and liberal in the kinds of poetry it covers. This entirely new selection brings in new poems and poets from all eras, extending the range by half a century, to include many 20th-century figures previously omitted—among them Philip Larkin, Samuel Beckett, Thom Gunn, and Elaine Feinstein, up to Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.

Here, as before, are lyric poems (beginning with medieval songs), satire, hymns, odes, sonnets, epithalamia, ballads... but also kinds of poetry not previously admitted: the rich dramatic verse of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster; major works of translation which are truly English poetry, such as Chapman's Homer (bringing along Keats's 'On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer'), Dryden's Juvenal, and many more. Beloved nursery rhymes for children, limericks, even clerics are also present. English poetry from all parts of the British Isles is consistently represented—Henryson and MacDiarmid, for example, now joined by Dunbar and Burns from Scotland; James Henry, Austin Clarke, and J. M. Synge now complementing Allingham and Yeats from Ireland; R. S. Thomas joins Dylan Thomas from Wales—and Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet, who wrote in America before its independence in 1770, take their rightful and rewarding place. Some of the greatest long poets are here in full—Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey', Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner', and Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market'—along with some of the shortest, such as haiku, lyrics, and praises.

Generous and wide-ranging, combining familiar and fresh delights, this is an anthology that will touch and excite all who love English poetry.