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

This one-volume anthology gathers British lyric poetry spanning roughly six hundred years, from the late medieval period to the early twentieth century. Its editors, Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine, arranged the selections to trace the development of the form across that long span. Readers move from Chaucer and the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets through the metaphysical writers, the eighteenth century and the Romantics, before reaching the Victorians and the modern voices of the early 1900s. The collection covers familiar subjects such as love, nature, mortality and the search for meaning, and it includes many of the best-known works in the language. Beyond the central selections, more than ninety further poems are included, making it a wide-ranging overview for anyone who wants to explore classic British verse.