The New Oxford book of sixteenth century verse

the long version

Too often anthologies of 16th-century poetry give the impression that poets wrote about little else than love - and a peculiarly exalted, literary kind of love at that. This new collection contains everything one might expect from the likes of Spencer, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne. But poetry and its subjects are a reflection of their time, and not since the Norman Conquest had there been such a social and artistic upheaval in England as during the 16th century. Renaissance ideals replaced late-Medieval ones, Protestantism replaced Catholicism, feudalism was replaced by early capitalism. To look simply for love poems from this period is therefore to deprive oneself of a whole body and work from perhaps one of the richest periods of English poetry. To appreciate that wealth to the full, look no futher than this superb new anthology. While including many of the acknowledged masterworks, it gives ample space to satire, epigram, and grotesquerie; religious, political, and social verse; and, not least, translations, which often amount to great original poems.