chosen by Christopher Ricks
‘I was tempted to list here Wavell’s Other Men’s Flowers, which I have loved for so long, but it stops of course at 1945, and that would preclude the access we must have to Philip Larkin and so many others. So, we will go with Christopher Rick’s TOBOEV for the poetry anthology my chosen five books must include, and nothing much could be better than that.
‘Here we find safely not just Larkin amongst recent-time poets, but Samuel Beckett, Thom Gunn, Elaine Feinstein, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney. We have Henryson, MacDiarmid, Dunbar and Burns from Scotland; James Henry, Austin Clarke, JM Synge, Allingham and Yeats from Ireland: RS Thomas and Dylan Thomas from Wales – all to add to the glorious abundance of English poetry in whatever form – lyric, satire, hymn, ode, sonnet, elegy, ballad, dramatic verse et al.