Author Description

This anthology brings together, in one single collection, the best and the most popular short lyrical poems from a period so rich in variety, scope and poetic craft that it could rightly be labelled the Golden Age of English poetry. Ranging from the late eighteenth century to the Great War, the selection spans 132 years of unparallelled poetic output, featuring more than 200 extraordinary poems by sixty poets as outstanding as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, the Brownings, Hopkins and Hardy. The overarching, global structure of the anthology is governed by the cycles of day, year, and life-beginning with morning, childhood and spring, and moving on through twenty-three vital movements, pertaining to different phases, towards night, winter and death.