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Poets on Poets

Edited by Nick Rennison and Michael Schmidt

Cover Picture of Poets on Poets
Imprint: Lives and Letters
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (420 pages)
(Pub. Oct 1997)
9781857543391
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Editors
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  • To mark National Poetry Day 1997, Nick Rennison, who compiled the Waterstone's Guide to Poetry, and Michael Schmidt, editorial director of Carcanet, invited a number of contemporary poets to select work by poets of the past, beginning in the late fourteenth century and ending in the early twentieth, and to provide brief headnotes to describe their choices. The result is an anthology with a difference. From Gower to Yeats, from the old and the new worlds, the selectors and the selected converge in a volume of wonderful poetry and rich surprise.

    Providing more than 450 pages of poetry and commentary in a handsome large two-column format, Poets on Poets celebrates vital continuities: the range of poets making selections and the range of poetry selected is without precedent in an English-language poetry anthology. Its aim is to encourage a wider readership of classic English poetry and to signal the generative connection between new poetry and the best of the past.



    Among the more than eighty pairings are:

    SIR THOMAS WYATT
    Elaine Feinstein
    EDMUND SPENSER
    John Heath-Stubbs
    WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
    Les Murray
    BEN JONSON
    Thom Gunn
    JOHN DONNE
    C.H.Sisson
    JOHN MILTON
    Peter Levi
    JOHN DRYDEN
    Christopher Logue
    EARL OF ROCHESTER Maureen Duffy
    THE ENGLISH HYMN WRITERS
    Anne Ridler
    WILLIAM BLAKE
    Kathleen Raine
    SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
    D.J.Enright
    THE BRONTE SISTERS
    Gillian Clarke
    EDWARD LEAR
    Sophie Hannah
    JOHN KEATS
    Andrew Motion
    ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
    Eavan Boland
    ROBERT BROWNING
    Mark Doty
    THOMAS HARDY
    Patricia Beer
    A. E. HOUSMAN
    Wendy Cope
    W. B. YEATS
    Thomas Kinsella
    EDGAR ALLAN POE
    Richard Wilbur
    Michael Schmidt
    Michael Schmidt FRSL, poet, scholar, critic and translator, was born in Mexico in 1947; he studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford, before settling in England. Among his many publications are several collections of poems and a novel, The Colonist (1981), about a boy’s childhood in Mexico. He is general ... read more
    Awards won by Nick Rennison Winner, 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem - Sasha Dugdale's 'Joy', published in PN Review 227  (PN Review 227 )
    Praise for Nick Rennison 'Its pleasures are longer term ones: as you return to it and re-read its substantial selections, you come to appreciate how and what each contributor is working on.'

    Jane Routh, The North 66

    '...this is the joy of New Poetries VIII: time and again you discover refreshing and compelling new styles and subjects'

    Jake Morris-Campbell, The Poetry School

    '...probably the most informative and entertaining poetry journal in the English-speaking world.'
    John Ashbery
     'The most engaged, challenging and serious-minded of all the UK's poetry magazines.'
    Simon Armitage
    'It has attempted to take poetry out of the backwaters of intellectual life and to find in it again the crucial index of cultural health.'
    Cairns Craig, Times Literary Supplement
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