Poets on poets - Nick Rennison

To mark National Poetry Day 1997, Nick Rennison, who compiled the Waterstone's Guide to Poetry, and Michael Schmidt, editorial director of Carcanet, invited a number of contemporary poets to select work by poets of the past, beginning in the late fourteenth century and ending in the early twentieth, and to provide brief headnotes to describe their choices. The result is an anthology with a difference. From Gower to Yeats, from the old and the new worlds, the selectors and the selected converge in a volume of wonderful poetry and rich surprise.

Providing more than 450 pages of poetry and commentary in a handsome large two-column format, Poets on Poets celebrates vital continuities: the range of poets making selections and the range of poetry selected is without precedent in an English-language poetry anthology. Its aim is to encourage a wider readership of classic English poetry and to signal the generative connection between new poetry and the best of the past.

Among the more than eighty pairings are:



SIR THOMAS WYATT
Elaine Feinstein

EDMUND SPENSER
John Heath-Stubbs

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Les Murray

BEN JONSON
Thom Gunn

JOHN DONNE
C.H.Sisson

JOHN MILTON
Peter Levi

JOHN DRYDEN
Christopher Logue

EARL OF ROCHESTER
Maureen Duffy

THE ENGLISH HYMN WRITERS
Anne Ridler

WILLIAM BLAKE
Kathleen Raine

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
D.J.Enright

THE BRONTE SISTERS
Gillian Clarke

EDWARD LEAR
Sophie Hannah

JOHN KEATS
Andrew Motion

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
Eavan Boland

ROBERT BROWNING
Mark Doty

THOMAS HARDY
Patricia Beer

A. E. HOUSMAN
Wendy Cope

W. B. YEATS
Thomas Kinsella

EDGAR ALLAN POE
Richard Wilbur