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The Golden Treasury
Francis Turner Palgrave
The most famous anthology of English poetry ever assembled. Francis Turner Palgrave's *Golden Treasury*, first published in 1861 with the close advice of his friend Alfred, Lord Tennyson, gathers the best short lyric poems in the language from the sixteenth century to the Romantics — Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, Milton, the Cavaliers, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Byron — arranged not alphabetically but by an artful sense of mood and progression. Palgrave's taste, confident and distinctly Victorian, shaped what generations understood the "canon" of English lyric to be; for decades the book was a fixture in schools and on bedside tables across the English-speaking world. Later editions extended its reach into the twentieth century. Anyone wanting a single, companionable volume of the traditional English lyric — to browse, memorize, or simply keep close — will understand at once why this one has never quite gone out of print.
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The editor
Francis Turner Palgrave (1824–1897) was an English critic, poet, and civil servant who became Professor of Poetry at Oxford. His lasting fame rests almost entirely on this anthology, compiled with the counsel of his close friend Tennyson, who helped shape the selections.
The book
The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (Macmillan, 1861) presents English lyric poetry from Wyatt and Shakespeare through the Romantics, ordered by an editorial sense of theme and feeling rather than chronology. It went through countless printings and expanded editions.
How it has aged
Beloved and enormously influential, it also enshrined a particular Victorian taste: it favors melodious lyric over difficulty, excludes living poets in its first edition, and reflects the blind spots of its moment (little from before the Renaissance, and few women). Read it as a superb gathering of a certain tradition, not a neutral map of English verse.
For more context
Compare with modern anthologies such as the Norton or Oxford collections to see how the canon has widened.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Francis Turner Palgrave
- Publisher
- Macmillan
- Place of publication
- London
- Year
- 1861
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Poetry
- Location
- Colorado