Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology

By Christine Gerrard

Book Overview

The second edition of this popular anthology reveals the rich variety of poetry produced in the period 1700-1800. New edition of this popular anthology of eighteenth-century poetry. Reveals the rich variety of poetry produced in this period. Traditionally prominent authors, such as Pope, Swift, Burns and Cowper, are represented alongside lesser-known writers, particularly women. For the second edition, the political and satirical content of the anthology has been strengthened with the inclusion of poems such as Charles Churchill's Night , Samuel Johnson's London and Swift's A Satirical Elegy on a Late Famous General . The revised edition includes material by two new women poets, Martha Sansom and Sarah Dixon. The editors continue to draw out interesting links between poems, and especially between male and female poets.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1405113197
• ISBN13: 9781405113199
• Release Date: February 2004
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Length: 592 Pages
• Weight: 4.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.8" x 1.8" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

The best of its kind

I've been teaching 18th and 19th century poetry courses for a few years and this anthology is the best I've found. The editorial choices favor the canon, as an anthology should. Many full texts of major poems are included, but so are texts of poems often overlooked but vital to a comprehensive survey. There are long excerpts of Thompson's The Seasons, for example, which very few anthologies think to include because it is a somewhat mind-numbing read and *hard* to teach to undergraduates; it is by far one of the most important poems of the early c18 decades. Because the anthology accounts for both a poem's initial reception and its teachability, it surpasses the competition.

Reshaping the Eighteenth-Century Canon

In Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, David Fairer and Christine Gerrard have created an important portable library. The contents have been organized in a variety of useful ways (chronologically as well as thematically) and insightfully selected to cover a range of voices and topics. The annotations stand up to repeated readings; the scholarship displays a rare mixture of subtlety and depth of knowledge. Although it is an invaluable teaching tool for undergraduates, I keep it on my desk as an accessible and meticulously accurate reference resource. There is no finer work of its kind.