The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language

In some quarters it was once fashionable to represent the success of The Golden Treasury as distorting for many decades the common reader's view of the English tradition. It's true that one would hardly gain a rounded view of, say, Shelley, or of the Augustan poets, from Palgrave's selection, and Shakespeare is mercilessly 'gutted' for plums; but can one question the quality of an anthology dominated by Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth? Palgrave has not set himself to be to be comprehensive, and should not be criticised for failing. The reader who seeks a complete overview of English verse must look elsewhere.

More reasonably, it will be objected that tastes have changed since 1861. Not unnaturally, Palgrave's choices do seem most readily disputable (but also most personal and revealing) as he approaches his own time. Could one not say the same of any more recent anthologist? This is one man's view, at one moment in time, of one strain of English poetry; but a view that proved to be extraordinarily influential, because it echoed so closely that of many of his fellows. The editor's frank pursuit of 'the beautiful' in its most obvious form struck a deep chord.

Some of Palgrave's omissions - that of Blake, for instance - are explicable merely by reference to the date at which the book was compiled. Pope and Swift, the one under-represented and the other absent, were not primarily lyric poets. Nearly 150 years later, in an age in which no canon has gone uncontested, the reader is more likely to be struck by how many of Palgrave's selections remain high in the esteem of contemporary critics, and how the poets to whom he gave precedence are still the giants of our own compilations. Perhaps Victorian taste was not after all so errant.

This edition reproduces the original 1861 edition of Palgrave's subsequently much revised and extended landmark anthology. As such it allows us to share the experience of the book's first readers: those of whom Palgrave was to remark that "The Editor will regard as his fittest readers those who love poetry so well, that he can offer them nothing not already known and valued."