The New Penguin Book of English VersePenguin booksPenguin classics

This revolutionary collection abandons the traditional poet-by-poet approach of most anthologies, presenting seven centuries of English verse as an uninterrupted sequence of poems ordered according to their first individual appearance in the language. The result is a more continuous view of English verse that reveals a fascinating new chronology. Furthermore, this volume chronicles the evolution of English verse in linguistic and historical-rather than only biographical-terms, presenting the texts with original spelling and punctuation. Through the words of the well known and the anonymous, in epitaphs, ballads, folk poetry, and nonsense verse, this definitive anthology gives readers the true voice of English poetry as it has developed from the fourteenth to the late twentieth century.