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(he was born in 1863) and, although frequently reprinted, now looks at best disarmingly bizarre and is in any case outdated.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,