Status
Available
Call number
Call number
821.08 New
Series
Genres
Collection
Publication
Oxford University Press (1978), Edition: First Edition, 384 pages
Description
Over 250 poems of light English verse including satire, nonsense verse, epigrams, and limericks by 80 authors from Shakespeare to modern times.
Media reviews
The New Review
Identifying light verse with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (a policy Milne advocates, and which Amis supports with the contention that it was essentially a reaction to Augustan ‘correctness’) means that the book is rather short; the pre-1800 selection is an almost-cursory fifty pages,
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with Rochester and Swift on the credit side and Samuel Butler and Samuel Wesley to balance them. Representation of the nineteenth century is, of course, much more expansive, though perhaps not quite so much as might be expected: Byron and Praed are, so to speak, the opening bats, and really no one else comes near them... The inclusion of Wodehouse and Coward pleases me at any rate, but I should have liked a lot more Gavin Ewart, and the one-poem ration of Kipling is astonishing, especially from Amis. “The Sergeant’s Wedding’ is only one of several qualifiers.
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Similar in this library
User reviews
LibraryThing member jjones42
Decent collection of light verse. Has a number of possibilities for the lost art of poetry memorization and declamation. I've used it a number of time for preparing for story-telling bonfires.
LibraryThing member auntieknickers
Since Amis includes both American and British authors in his anthology, it seems odd to me that Ogden Nash is not included. Still, there are many other gems in this volume, which appears weighted toward poets known for more serious work.
LibraryThing member antiquary
This collection is more consistently "ight" than Auden's version, and starts later (with Shakespeare) and is proportionately more modern, ging down close to the 70's when it was published. However, somehow I was not as fascinated by it as I was by some items in the earlier version.
LibraryThing member Fledgist
A fine successor to Auden's anthology.
Pages
384