The New Penguin Book
of Romantic Poetry, edited by
Jonathan & Jessica Wordsworth
Penguin Books, 1056 pages, $20
Click to buy the book.

When Francis Turner Palgrave published his famous anthology, The Golden Treasury, in 1861, he made his editorial standard plain in the subtitle: “the best songs and lyrical poems in the English language.” The word appears again, without apology, in the first sentence of his preface: “the best original Lyrical pieces . . . and none beside the best.” The formula echoes the definition of culture itself, by Palgrave’s contemporary Matthew Arnold, as “the best that has been thought and said.” ...

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