Christopher Ricks' reconstitution of the canonical Oxford Book of English Verse begins with the anonymous medieval cuckoo song, "Sumer is icumen in" and ends with the Irishman Seamus Heaney's celebration of "The Pitchfork:
Riveted steel, turned timber, burnish, grain The springiness, the clip and dart of it."
From seven centuries between those two, Ricks has chosen for a desert island or your night table his touchstone poems defining the truly excellent: the great Shakespeare dramatic speeches as well as the sonnets, limericks and nursery rhymes as well as the great love lyrics.
Anthologies like this are where most of us meet our poets and learn our poetry. But collections like the Oxford are also arenas for fierce fights: in the Ricks case: why so much Kipling, so little Yeats? Don't Americans write English verse?
Among living moderns, is Ricks picking classics or playing favorites? The new Oxford English Verse in this hour. (Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
