The Oxford Book of English Verse is exactly one hundred years old. The first editor was a gentleman-amateur, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who was appointed Professor of English Literature at Cambridge as a reward for years of service to the Liberal Party. His Oxford Book reflected the tastes of his generation (he was born in 1863) and, although frequently reprinted, now looks at best disarmingly bizarre and is in any case outdated. Its replacement in 1972 was, by contract, the work of a professional academic, Dame Helen Gardner, an authority on Donne and T. S. Eliot. In revising and expanding her volume, Christopher Ricks, a scholar of legendary range but also an amateur of poetry in the best sense of the phrase, begins, as she did, with the thirteenth-century lyric “Sumer is icumen in” and ends, as she did, about a quarter of a century before the publication date. In Gardner’s case the terminus was Dylan Thomas, in Ricks’s it is Seamus Heaney. Some might wish he had ventured further (I am not the only reviewer to feel he ought to have included Tony Harrison), but, after all, there are plenty of anthologies of contemporary poetry—if anybody wants one.

Although Ricks reconstructs and extends Gardner’s work rather than demolishing it, the result is very different. He prints sixty fewer items in three hundred fewer pages, but his book feels more roomy in the Medieval and Renaissance sections, and tauter in the Victorian one. Unlike Gardner, he admits popular poetry, translations, and excerpts from plays. Cutting down on the ruminative mode, and sharpening up individual entries by judicious selection, he widens our sense of the scope of several writers and makes room for many new poems, especially by women, the Scots and Irish, and Americans before the 1770s. Sometimes the changes affect the total impression of a poet’s work. Gardner’s Jonson selection is better, for my taste, than Ricks’s, and he makes some surprising omissions; we look in vain for Herbert’s “The Collar” or “The Pulley,” Vaughan’s “Man,” Tennyson’s “Mariana” or “The Lady of Shalott,” Yeats’s “Easter 1916” or “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” which are replaced by what seem slighter poems by those authors. There is nothing from The Prelude in the Wordsworth section, no James Thomson (of The Seasons) at all, and far too much Landor. But Ricks’s Shelley and Browning, and a host of minor Victorians, are sensibly pruned, while his Wyatt, Pope, Blake, Hardy, Housman, Edward Thomas, and Robert Graves are all much stronger than Gardner’s. Contemporary writers fare variously: Charles Tomlinson and Geoffrey Hill are somewhat flattered, Larkin, Hughes, and Heaney not shown at their best.

If such comments are a polite way of saying the reviewer would have done it rather differently, that is not meant as a carping criticism. Indeed, it is inevitable, because any anthology is a reflection of the taste of its compiler. Ricks’s sense of the tradition of English poetry is his own, just as mine is mine. It neither can nor should be otherwise. “Tradition,” wrote Eliot, “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.” It is impossible to say at what point the concept of a tradition entered English poetry; if traditions depend upon a set of conventions of thought and expression shared by writers and readers, we have always had them, from Old English onwards. At any rate, the history of poetic revolutions is a history of traditions overthrown only to be re-adopted in other guises. No one could on occasion write in such an Augustan way as Wordsworth, while, early in the twentieth century, Eliot pillaged French symbolist poetry to create that major American invention, English modernism. Ricks allows us to hear poems calling to each other across the centuries, to guard a sense of tradition, while not being enslaved to it. After all, the word means “what you drag along behind you,” and we want to lighten the load from time to time.

Forestalling objections from the thought police about his title, Ricks reminds us that the language and its literature are still called “English” not “British.” Nonetheless, they have long been a kind of stockpot into which diverse ingredients have been thrown, stirred, and left to marinate. The word “English” itself refers not to a nation, but to a tribe. Latin hymnody and the Vulgate Bible, classical and vernacular epic, troubadour lyric, nonconformist preaching, popular ballads, Chinese love songs, Scots dialect—all among other sources have made English poetry what it is. Yet our poetic inheritance is not what consumerism calls “heritage,” and our young people are shamefully disinherited by a national curriculum which prescribes poets chosen by politicians and has largely abandoned the study of the Bible and the classical languages. High culture continues, proudly, to drink from those ancient springs. Eliot was not the last poet to assume a Christian frame of reference, and, in the closing pages of Ricks’s anthology, Geoffrey Hill refashions Ovid while Heaney adapts Dante. Yet this is seen as “élitist,” so, in the name of accessibility, schoolchildren are offered rap or pop or pap. Maybe poetry has always been a minority occupation, but when there was less education, people seemed to know far more of and about it. There could be few better presents for a young relative than this book, and few better donors than an adult who could read it with the recipient.

Literary tradition is inseparable from tradition of other kinds. The Reformation— the biggest assault on tradition which England has known—left its mark on poetry. Barely thirty pages into the Oxford Book comes Wyatt, and with him new ways, not just of thinking or of writing, but of being. His versions of the Penitential Psalms (Ricks prints no. 130), if not unambiguously Lutheran, are at least coolly detached from Catholic traditions of sacramental penance, and marked by a chaste and plain diction beside which the proto-baroque conceits of Southwell’s “The Burning Babe” look almost vulgar. Southwell’s imagery became impossible, except to later fellow-Catholics such as Crashaw, or was diluted into pretty playthings, as in so much (too much) of Herrick. Herbert, as ever, brings off the balancing act; Ricks finds no room for an excerpt from “The Sacrifice,” the nearest approach to a medieval poem written after the Middle Ages had ended, but prints “Redemption,” in which Herbert represents himself as a poor tenant seeking a renegotiation of the lease from his rich landlord, and searching for him in vain amid the rich and pleasant places of this world:

At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth

Of theeves and murderers: there I him

espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said,
and died.

“A ragged noise” is breathtaking, but hardly less so, once we think about it, is “straight”: he said it immediately, but also in straits, and stretched out on the Cross. Almost the only poet now writing like this at all is R. S. Thomas; it’s a pity that Ricks prints four examples of his earlier work, and steers clear of the later, starkly despairing religious poetry.

Overall, though, Ricks deserves praise for assembling a book which could prompt many lines of thought, and which is the product of eclecticism saved by sureness of taste from becoming willful. Almost every poem, the knowledge of which once marked a cultivated person, is here; and, amid many rarities and rescue operations, how good to hear no trace of that tone of voice—mean-minded, cynically sneering or narcissistic—in which so much contemporary verse is written. This is an anthology for those of us who still wish to think well of life, and of poetry.