Prefaced by an introductory Note by editor Philip Smith, Dover Thrift Editions’ 100 Best-Loved Poems are arranged chronologically and chosen to ‘provide a concise overview of the development of verse writing in the British Isles and America from the Renaissance until the early 20th century’. The editor acknowledges the difficulty of selecting representative examples from such a vast and complex subject, and the fact that very fine longer poems have been omitted due to constraints of space in this slim volume.

The list of poets read like a Who’s Who in English Literature, from Marlowe and Shakespeare, John Donne and Ben Johnson in the late 16th -early 17th century, to Milton, Lovelace and Marvell in the mid-late 17th, through Gray, Blake and Burns in the 18th, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley in the early 19th, to the Brownings, Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Matthew Arnold , Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Louis Stevenson in the mid-late 19th century, to 20th century poets like Kipling, Yeats, Robert Frost, Wilfred Owen, all the way to e. e. cummings, W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas.

The poems chosen in this edition are, if not the best known, certainly among the best and the most well-known of each poet. More often than not, these are poems that you have heard or read or studied at some time in your life. Since exactly 100 poems are present, and more than 50 poets are represented, some poets only rate one poem while others have two or three or, in a few cases, even more.

For instance, the Brownings are represented by his (Robert Browning) My Last Duchess and her (Elizabeth Barrett Browning) famous Sonnet XLIII (“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”)—perfect choices, like Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky. However, Christina Rossetti’s only poem here in A Birthday, when this reader couldn’t help feel that her Song (“When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me”) or Echo (“Come to me in the silence of the night; Come in the speaking silence of a dream”) should have been included as well.

Then again, Shakespeare himself only rated four sonnets, Milton only two: On His Blindness and On His Deceased Wife. However, Edgar Allan Poe is disproportionately represented, taking up 5 pages with 3 poems, one of which is the excellent but decidedly long The Raven. My feeling is that if The Raven is included, and it should be, then it should be the only one for Poe, and the other two (To Helen, and Annabel Lee) omitted. That would leave more space for Matthew Arnold, whose only poem here is Dover Beach. Sure, that’s the one to include if he’s only allowed one. But if The Raven is not too long to be included in this edition, then for sure Matthew Arnold’s The Buried Life should be included, or perhaps even his admittedly long but lovely siren song The Forsaken Merman.

Emily Dickinson has four poems here, but then hers are all so short anyway, so I don’t grudge her the space. Yeats has three, but where is my favourite, the beautiful He Wishes For The Cloths of Heaven (“Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light”)? And if Wilfred Owen is represented by his Anthem for Doomed Youth, then where is Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier (“If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England”)?

Having said that, it cannot be an easy task to choose 100 poems from the vast repository of English verse, and personal feelings must come into such a subjective selection of ‘best-loved’ poems. All in all, this Dover Thrift Editions’ 100 Best-Loved Poems is a great introduction to English verse in general and will act as a taster for a more inclusive anthology like The New Golden Treasury of English Verse or the similar The Penguin Book of English Verse.