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Title: The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse (Penguin Classics) by Daniel Karlin, George Macbeth ISBN: 0-14-044578-1 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: June, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95

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Average Customer Rating: 1 (1 review)

Rating: 1
Summary: Victorian Verse Flops Again
Comment: Penguin has brought out this new volume to replace George MacBeth's eccentric and useless volume in the Penguin Classics series. But Karlin's production is equally dismal. These books, though theoretically aimed at a non-specialist audience, seem actually constructed for the amusement of exclusively donnish readers. Many of the most powerful and important achievements in Victorian poetry are ignored by this volume. Among the missing are: "The Scholar-Gypsy," "The Triumph of Time," "The Defense of Guenevere," and "Wessex Heights." The Ring and the Book is entirely unrepresented as is Empedocles on Etna. At the same time the volume includes great lumps of unpoetic babble. Clough's dull prosings are allotted 40 pages by Karlin while D. G. Rossetti is ludicrously restricted to 6! The Arnold selection is hopelessly unrepresentative, but Karlin manages room for such waxwork poetry as the following: I can read of thee,and find out/How thou fliest fast or slow;/Of thee in the north and south too,/Of thy great moustachioed mouth too,/And thy Latin name also (from Mary Howitt, The Dor-Hawk). Or the reader can thrill to Thomas Miller's The Ant-Lion: Then get into the sand his head,/Give it a bite and he is dead. The Ant-Lion has, perhaps, had some say in the construction of this anthology.After the misfire of MacBeth's volume, I would have thought Penguin would have been careful to publish a volume that its potential readers would have welcomed. They won't welcome this.