The Oxford Book of Travel Verse Book

Here is a poetry collection sure to delight and inspire the adventurous traveler and the armchair dreamer alike. As pilgrims, missionaries and explorers, as soldiers, diplomats, merchants and tourists, the British have for many centuries ventured forth to see the world. Among them have been great poets like Marvell, Shelley, Coleridge, and Rossetti, and some whose voices are less well-known, brought together for the first time in an anthology that charts the British abroad as reflected in their verse. The romantic passion of Wordsworth and Byron, fired by the awesome landscape of the Alps or the glories of Italy, is tempered by the reaction of travelers faced with discomfort, delay and dissapointment: James Boswell in Mannheim, Miss Emily Brittle on her way to India, and David Constantine watching for dolphins. Poet-adventurers and poet-diplomats, writing about voyages with Captain Cook and expeditions to Mt. Everest, the British in India and the Russian character and landscape, rub shoulders with sacred voyagers to the Holy Land and the contemporary day-visitor to France. Reflecting on their reactions to the new America are William McGonagall and Rudyard Kipling. While in the present century Lawrence Durrell, Alan Ross and D. J. Enright take us to Australia, the Far East and South America. At the end, the reader will have traveled to almost every country in the world and enjoyed selections from some five centuries of verse.Read More