Hard Labour

Frank Kermode

  • The Poems of Andrew Marvell edited by Nigel Smith
    Longman, 468 pp, £50.00, January 2003, ISBN 0 582 07770 2

The task of keeping us interested in the canonical poets seems now to have fallen mainly to the Longman Annotated English Poets series. But who are we? Every time another volume is added somebody has to decide who we are, how many we are, and how much annotation and prefatory material we’ll want in addition to a reliable text. Given that nobody really knows the market for the canonical poets, or how many people are willing to work with a full-scale edition, these cannot be easy decisions. Perhaps it is in accordance with them that the quantity of annotation, even within this series, varies from one volume to another.

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