The Oxford Book of Travel Verse

By editor Grossley-Holland, Kevin

Book Overview

Here is a poetry collection sure to delight and inspire the adventurous traveler and the armchair dreamer alike. As pilgrims, missionaries and explorers, as soldiers, diplomats, merchants and tourists, the British have for many centuries ventured forth to see the world. Among them have been great poets like Marvell, Shelley, Coleridge, and Rossetti, and some whose voices are less well-known, brought together for the first time in an anthology that charts the British abroad as reflected in their verse.
The romantic passion of Wordsworth and Byron, fired by the awesome landscape of the Alps or the glories of Italy, is tempered by the reaction of travelers faced with discomfort, delay and dissapointment: James Boswell in Mannheim, Miss Emily Brittle on her way to India, and David Constantine watching for dolphins. Poet-adventurers and poet-diplomats, writing about voyages with Captain Cook and expeditions to Mt. Everest, the British in India and the Russian character and landscape, rub shoulders with sacred voyagers to the Holy Land and the contemporary day-visitor to France.
Reflecting on their reactions to the new America are William McGonagall and Rudyard Kipling. While in the present century Lawrence Durrell, Alan Ross and D. J. Enright take us to Australia, the Far East and South America. At the end, the reader will have traveled to almost every country in the world and enjoyed selections from some five centuries of verse.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0192141562
• ISBN13: 9780192141569
• Release Date: March 1987
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 456 Pages
• Weight: 2.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 1.6" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Beautiful, enchanting

The book will enchant you and take you to another place and time. It is filled with poetry about world travels thought the ages. Here is a brief outline of the themes for the different chapters: EN ROUTE sample poem: In Praise of Seafaring Men in Hopes of Good Frotune by Sir Richard Grenville, 1500's, Jobson's Amen by Rudyard Kipling, First FLight by Dorothy Willesley, dutchess of wellington, 1800's EUROPE OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC sample poems: from Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, An Orchard at Avignon by Agnes Mary Robinson, Tobacco Plant by Ivor Gurney, Summer Journey by W.R. Rodgers, A Day in France by David Holbrook IBERIA From the Way to Jerusalem by anonymous, from The Spanish Gypsy by GEoge Eliot ITALY sample poems: On Descending the River by William Parson's Naples by Samuel Rodgers, The Grave of Shelley by Oscar Wilde, In a Shuttered Room I Roast by Dylan Thomas GREECE AND THE BALKANS Sample poems: from Paradise Regained by John Milton, An Forgetful of Europe by Geoffrey Grigson, The Parthenon by John Heath-Stubbs EUROPE OF THE NORTH--THE LOW COUTRIES sample poems: THe Character of Holland by Andrew Marvell, Incident at Bruges by William Wordsworth, Brussels in Winter by W.H. Auden GERMANY AND AUSTRIA Sample: Garden at Heidelberg by Walte Savage Landor, Vienna by Peter Porter SWITZERLAND sample: THe Great St. Bernard by Samuel Rogers, Ode to the =Lake of Geneva by William Parsons, Alpines' Spirit Song by Thomas Lovell Beddoes BEYOND THE IRON CURTAIN samples: The CLoud by Edwin Muir, Small Park in East Germany: 1969 by gerda Mayer SCANDINAVIA WITH ICELAND sample: A Winter-Piece. Epistle to Lord Dorset by Ambose Philips, Sonnet Upon a Swedish Cottage by Sir John Carr IRELAND sample: Written in Ireland by Mary Alcock, The Samll Towns of Ireland by Sir John Betjean THE LEVANT AFRICA ASIA the INDIAN SUBCONTINENT THE FAR EAST OCEANA THE AMERICAS--SOUTH AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN NORTH AMERICA HOME THOUGHTS