The fourth edition of this standard work contains 1800 poems by 300 poets, with 600 poems and 100 poets newly included. The anthology offers more poetry by women (40 new poets), with special attention to early women poets. The book also includes a greater diversity of American poetry, with double the number of poems by African American, Hispanic, native American and Asian American poets. There are 26 new poets representing the Commonwealth literature tradition: now included are more than 37 poets from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Caribbean, South Africa and India. A reconsideration of many classic poets, from Shakespeare and Bradstreet to Larkin and Rich has been added in this edition, together with a wider representation of the beginnings of poetry in English: the Anglo-Saxon "Caedmon's Hymn" and selections from "Beowulf", as well as Middle English lyrics, popular riddles, romance, allegory, and the verse tales of Chaucer and Langland, are now included. The collection also includes short biographical sketches and a system of annotation.
Margaret Ferguson (Ph.D. Yale University) is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Californiaravis. She is author of Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (2003) and Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (1984). She is coeditor of Feminism in Time, Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law, Literacies in Early Modern England and a critical edition of Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam.
Mary Jo Salter (M.A. Cambridge University) is Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College, where she teaches poetry and poetry-writing. She has published several books of poems, including Henry Purcell in Japan (1985), Unfinished Painting (1989), Sunday Skaters (1994), A Kiss in Space (1999), and, most recently, Open Shutters (2003). A vice president of the Poetry Society of America, she has also served as poetry editor of The New Republic.
Jon Stallworthy (M.A. and B.Litt. Oxford) is Senior Research Fellow at Wolfson College of Oxford University, where he is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature. He is also former John Wendell Anderson Professor at Cornell, where he taught after a career at Oxford University Press. His biography of Wilfred Owen won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His biography of Louis MacNeice won the Southern Arts Literary Prize. He is also the author of Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems and Singing School: The Making of a Poet, and editor of the definitive edition of Wilfred Owen's poetry, The Complete Poems and Fragments; The Penguin Book of Love Poetry; The Oxford Book of War Poetry; and coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Stallworthy has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
