Condition: Acceptable condition for a used book! Some wear. Previous owner's name written inside front cover. Paint splotch on front board. See images for the condition of this book.
Blurb: The chronological scope of the collection is indicated in the title: it begins with four selections from the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales and a few medieval folk ballads (all in the original middle English), and finishes with Kipling's 1901 classic "Recessional." In between, the editors provide poems (or selections from long poems) from most of the pre-20th century giants of British poetry, including Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, and Browning, and not a few minor ones, such as Robert Herrick, Thomas Campbell, Lord Macaulay, and George Walter Thornbury. In all, 134 selections are included, and 51 named poets are represented. Parrott and Long (who were colleagues at Princeton Univ.) prefaced the collection with a ten-page "Outline Sketch" of the history of English poetry, which was instructive to a beginner; they also provide short biographical-critical sketches of most of the poets featured, and nearly 100 pages of helpful explanatory endnotes on the individual poems. (Anything by John Donne is regrettably omitted, and the editors' history unfairly dismisses him and the entire metaphysical school in two deprecatory sentences. Women poets are also under-represented, Elizabeth Barrett Browning being the only one included.)