Selected Poems Of Gray Collins Goldsmith And Cowper

There are anthologies, and then there are anthologies with the quiet confidence to gather Gray, Collins, Goldsmith and Cowper into one compact volume, as though four of the eighteenth century’s most civilised poetic minds might comfortably share a shelf and improve the reader by association. Selected Poems of Gray, Collins, Goldsmith and Cowper is exactly that sort of book: modest in size, considerable in taste, and steeped in the old educational faith that a person with a little time and a proper hardback could be introduced to melancholy, elegance, moral reflection and poetic polish all at once.

Edited by Guy Boas and published in 1926 by Thomas Nelson and Sons, this is a wonderfully characteristic survivor from the era when literary culture was still happily compact. Publishers believed poetry need not arrive in monumental collected editions or expensive finery. It could come instead in neat, durable form, sized for the hand, the satchel or the bedside table, and carry within it enough feeling and craftsmanship to outlast most louder books by several generations.

The poets assembled here make an excellent company. Thomas Gray brings his stately melancholy and his gift for making reflection sound permanently dignified. William Collins contributes that more fragile and musical intensity which has made him beloved by readers who enjoy their poetry touched with atmosphere and a little noble sadness. Oliver Goldsmith offers warmth, clarity and humane observation, always writing as though civilisation might still be saved by taste and decency. And William Cowper, with his mixture of inwardness, moral feeling, domestic observation and sudden force, brings the whole gathering a distinctly personal note. Together they form a kind of eighteenth-century dream team of seriousness, grace and cultivated feeling.

There is something wonderfully ironic about old poetry anthologies of this sort. They were often compiled for students, general readers and improving households, with the cheerful assumption that one might naturally spend an evening with elegy, meditative verse and polished moral sentiment. Modern publishing tends to become a little nervous if a reader is asked to sit quietly with poetry for too long. This volume belongs to the older and rather more optimistic view that such reading was not an eccentricity but part of being properly educated. A charming idea, and perhaps not entirely a bad one.

This 1926 Thomas Nelson and Sons edition has exactly the right sort of restrained dignity. It looks like a book built for use rather than display: compact, practical, and quietly certain of its worth. The blue cloth binding visible in the image has that familiar Nelson solidity, the kind that suggests the book may once have lived on a school or domestic shelf where literature still enjoyed a respectable place in daily life. It carries no needlessly decorative fuss, only the calm implication that what matters is inside.

In Good condition, this copy has survived admirably. It has the attractive air of a book that has lived a sensible life and come through it with its composure intact. Anthologies of verse are often more appealing when they show just a little age, because poetry itself tends to settle comfortably into time. The volume looks clean, usable and self-possessed, exactly as a compact selection of canonical poets ought to look.

What also makes books like this so enjoyable now is the pleasure of unexpected variety. A single-author volume offers immersion; an anthology offers conversation. Here the reader moves from one poetic temperament to another, seeing how differently each writer handles memory, feeling, landscape, loss, reflection and the strange effort of making experience sound both elevated and exact. The result is less like reading one continuous book and more like spending time in very good company, provided that one’s idea of good company includes meditative verse and occasional sorrow over the passing of things.

As a Crappy Old Books item, this is exactly the right kind of treasure: compact, thoughtful, quietly literary and full of the old-fashioned confidence that poetry belongs in ordinary life. It will appeal to lovers of eighteenth-century verse, collectors of old Nelson editions, readers with a weakness for anthologies, and anyone who likes their books small in format but large in cultural ambition.

In short, Selected Poems of Gray, Collins, Goldsmith and Cowper is a delightful little 1926 volume: a neatly bound gathering of reflective, graceful and enduring English poetry from four writers who knew how to make seriousness sing. In Good condition, this Thomas Nelson and Sons edition remains a very attractive Crappy Old Books survivor — modest, intelligent, and carrying within its covers enough melancholy, elegance and poetic civilisation to improve even the most disorderly shelf.

Keep browsing: See more Poetry books Other books by Guy Boas