Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats

Uniquely comprehensive...highly readable...the definitive collection of classic lyric poetry.

From Shakespeare's wise music to Marvell's profundity and wit...from the Romantics' passionate view of man and woman and nature to twentieth-centur poets' confused searching, this outstanding one-volume collection brings us the profound, soul-nourishing experience of great poetry.

Brilliantly selected and arranged by renowned literary masters Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine, the poems here reflect the genius of six centuries of poets. It is the finest anthology of lyric poetry ever published.

"Truth" by Geoffrey Chaucer
"Ophelia's Song" by William Shakespeare
"The Canonization" by John Donne
"To Heaven" by Ben Jonson
"Ode on Solitude" by Alexander Pope
"The Tyger" by William Blake
"The Solitary Reaper" by William Wordsworth
"Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats
"God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins
"Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats

and more than ninety additional classic poems.


About the Author
Robert Penn Warren taught English at Yale University and was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and one for poetry, and of the National Book Award for poetry. He was the author, with Cleanth Brooks, of Understanding Fiction, and of the novels All the King's Men, World Enough and Time, Band of Angels, and Flood, as well as many other works of fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. He died in 1989.

Albert Erskine was a vice president and executive editor at Random House in New York. He was also on the staff of The Southern Review and was associated with the Louisiana State University Press. He died in 1993.