Book: A Book of Famous Verse

Overview

A Book of Famous Verse (1892), selected and edited by the American essayist Agnes Repplier, is a compact anthology designed to gather the most widely known English-language poems into a single, accessible volume. It embraces the late nineteenth century’s conviction that poetry lives most fully in memory and on the tongue, privileging pieces that had entered common speech, schoolroom recitation, and parlor reading. Rather than compiling a scholar’s exhaustive survey, Repplier curates an intimate canon whose fame rests on repeated public affection.

Aims and Selection

Repplier frames “famous” not as a strict judgment of merit but as a measure of cultural presence. Her choices favor poems that readers recognize at a glance, whether for a ringing refrain, a memorable scene, or a moral turn that invites reflection. Ballads of bravery, elegies of quiet sorrow, odes to nature, love lyrics, devotional pieces, and historical narratives sit side by side. The thrust is mnemonic: lines that carry, cadences suited to speaking aloud, and imagery that fixes itself in the mind. In this sense the anthology captures the poetry of shared memory rather than the rarer poetry of specialist esteem.

Contents and Organization

The volume spans centuries, from Shakespeare’s songs and the high harmonies of Milton to the romantic intensities of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Byron, and onward to the Victorian music of Tennyson and Browning. American voices, Longfellow’s ringing meters, Bryant’s reflective calm, Whittier’s moral clarity, Poe’s sonorous gloom, appear alongside the British mainstream, marking a deliberately transatlantic scope. Some long poems arrive as extracts, chosen at their most quotable turns: the spectral hush of a churchyard, the surge of a battle charge, the stillness before a night sea. Arrangement leans toward smooth reading rather than rigid chronology, balancing genres and moods to sustain variety.

Editorial Features and Tone

Repplier supplies brief notices that identify authors and situate difficult passages, keeping apparatus spare so the poems can speak without heavy mediation. Spelling and text are handled with a light modernizing touch characteristic of the period’s anthologies. The editor’s sensibility favors clarity, cadence, and moral intelligibility; irony and difficulty are not banished, but poems that require a long apprenticeship yield space to pieces that reward a single, attentive sit-down with strong music and plain sentiment.

Cultural Context and Reception

The anthology belongs to the era of elocution manuals, school declamation, and the parlor as a stage. It guided learners toward pieces suitable for recitation, patriotic stanzas, noble laments, narrative scenes with crisp closure, while also offering household readers a treasury for evening reading aloud. Its selections mirror late Victorian taste: reverence for nature and duty, tenderness toward domestic feeling, admiration for stoic heroism, and a fondness for moral fable. At the same time, the book implicitly maps a common cultural ground shared across Britain and America, where the same verses could bind readers in Philadelphia and London.

Canon and Gaps

Repplier’s choices reflect the canon as it stood: Gray’s measured melancholy, Goldsmith’s polished humanity, Scott’s galloping narratives, Campbell’s martial vigor, and pieces by Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti that had become fixtures of memory. The representation of women and non-Anglo traditions is limited, a reminder of the period’s boundaries as much as its ideals. Within those limits, the anthology gives durable space to poems that shaped public feeling and speech.

Significance

A Book of Famous Verse endures as a snapshot of what “everybody knew” in poetry at the fin de siècle. It preserves the soundscape of a reading culture that prized memorization, moral resonance, and the communal pleasures of spoken verse. As a curated bridge between literary history and everyday readers, it documents not only which poems were loved, but how and why they were carried in the mind.