Tony Frazer (ed.) : Poets of Devon & Cornwall – from Barclay to Coleridge Click on book covers for more information.
Shearsman Classics No. 1.
Published 2007, 8.5x5.5ins, 148pp, £9.95 / $17. ISBN 9781905700509
Alexander Barclay, George Peele, John Ford, Humfrey Gifford, Richard Carew, Anne Dowriche, Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Arthur Gorges, Joseph Hall, Robert Herrick, Sidney Godolphin, William Strode, William Browne, Thomas Spratt, Mary, Lady Chudleigh, Thomas D'Urfey, John Gay, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
All of these are poets born in the two westernmost counties of England, or—like Hall and Herrick—poets who were active there. In time we stretch from the very beginning of the 16th century until the early 19th century. We begin with Barclay, a priest working in Ottery St. Mary, and we close with Coleridge, the son of a priest in Ottery St. Mary, his birthplace.
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Robert Herrick : Selected Poems
Shearsman Classics No. 2. Edited by Tony Frazer.
Published 2007. 8.5x5.5ins, 120pp, £8.95 / $15. ISBN 9781905700493
Robert Herrick (1591–1674) was perhaps the greatest poet to have worked in Devon. Born in London, the son of a goldsmith, he studied at Cambridge and later fell in with the London poets who had gathered around the magnetic figure of Ben Jonson. In order to make a living—since he had not pursued the family trade—he entered the Church and in 1627 was appointed chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham, whom he accompanied on an unsuccessful military expedition in 1627. In 1629 he was appointed to the living of Dean Prior, a village on the edge of Dartmoor, about half way between Exeter and Plymouth. He was to remain there for the rest of his life, with the exception of the Cromwellian period from 1647–1660, during which he was expelled for his royalist sympathies and, no doubt, also doctrinal disagreements.
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Tony Frazer (ed): Spanish Poetry of the Golden Age, in contemporary English translations
Shearsman
Classics No. 3.
Published 2008. Paperback, 139pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17. ISBN 9781905700691
Some of the greatest writers of 16th and 17th century Spain are represented here, in translations from 16th and 17th century England. This was an era when translation was important for the dissemination of new styles and forms, and it gives a fascinating view of two great literatures interacting—for both were at their peak: the Spanish Golden Age stretches from roughly 1540 to 1660, and the first great era of English poetry and drama overlaps this almost exactly. Poems by Montemayor, Boscán, Garcilaso, Góngora, Quevedo, Cervantes, Argensola and Mendoza; translations by Sidney, Ayres, Fanshawe, Drummond, Stanley, Yong and Shelton.
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Mary, Lady Chudleigh: Selected Poems
Shearsman
Classics Vol. 4. Edited
by Julie Sampson
Published September 2009. Paperback, 148pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610484 [Download a sample from this book here.]
Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656–1710) was a confidante of John Dryden and a leading figure amongst the women writers of her day. In many ways a proto-feminist, Lady Chudleigh was still a provincial aristocrat and devout Protestant, and her work shows many of the apparent contradictions of the early modern era. This is the only selection of her work available in paperback, and her work deserves to be known for more than a few anthology standards.
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William Strode: Selected Poems
Shearsman
Classics Vol. 5. Edited
by Tony Frazer.
Published
October 2009. Paperback, 100pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848610057 [Download a sample from this book here.]
William Strode, born in Plympton, Devon, in the early years of the 17th century, is a little-known poet of the Jacobean and Caroline eras, but he was a fine lyric poet and little deserves his oblivion. Hitherto the only publication of his work was by Bertram Dobell in 1907, since which time he has often been anthologised but never again granted a volume of his own. This volume redresses the balance.
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Sir Thomas Wyatt Selected Poems
Shearsman
Classics Vol. 6. Edited by Michael Smith.
Published January 2010. Paperback, 110pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $16
ISBN 9781848611023 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) was born at Allington Castle in Kent. he studied at St John's College, Cambridge, and served King Henry VIII in various capacities both at home and abroad. he was knighted in 1535, but was imprisoned in the Tower a year alter following a quarrel with the Duke of Suffolk, but also perhaps because of suspicion that he had been the lover of Anne Boleyn—a woman he had known for many years and with whim he had been linked at one time. He was released the same year, then was to fall afoul of authority on at least two further occasions, but was again pardoned. He is remembered today as one of the most important poets in the English language, and as the man who brought the sonnet into English, with his spectacular imitations and re-creations of Petrarch. His work is broader than that, however, and he also showed himself to be a fine elegist and satirist, as well as a lyric poet of the very first order.
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Tottel's Miscellany (1557)
Shearsman
Classics Vol. 7 (The Tudor Miscellanies Vol. 1)
Published January 2010. Paperback, 300pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $21 / Can$22.95
ISBN 9781848611030 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
1557 saw the publication of this ground-breaking volume: the first printed anthology of contemporary poetry in English. The book is built on a foundation of two recently-deceased aristocratic poets, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who had by their example given English poetry a new direction, above all with the introduction of the Petrarchan sonnet, but also with the invention of blank verse. The anthology was to have an enormous impact, giving witness to the latest developments in English verse for a far bigger public than would have been the norm in the mid-16th century, when manuscripts tended to circulate anonymously and in a small circle of gentlemen.
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The Phoenix Nest (1593)
Shearsman
Classics Vol. 8 (The Tudor Miscellanies Vol. 2)
Published January 2010. Paperback, 116pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $17 / Can$18.95
ISBN 9781848611047[Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Following the publication of Tottel's Miscellany in 1557, a number of other such miscellanies appeared, none of them especially significant from an artistic point of view. In 1593, however, a still-unidentified gentleman known only by his initials (R.S.) published this relatively slim, well-printed and well-designed compilation, which included works by a number oif significant poets of the day—those identified are Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Lodge, Nicholas Breton, Robert Greene, George Peele, the Earl of Oxford, Sir Edward Dyer, and Thomas Watson. It is almost certain that the Phoenix of the title was Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586), to whom the first three elegies in the book are dedicated.
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Englands Helicon (1600)
Shearsman
Classics Vol. 9 (The Tudor Miscellanies Vol.
3)
Published September 2010. Paperback, 228pp, 9x6ins, £12.95 / $21
ISBN 9781848611054 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Following the publication in 1557 of Tottel's Miscellany, a number of other anthologies or miscellanies appeared. Englands Helicon differs from its predecessors in representing a particular style of writing—the newly fashionable pastoral style, with its origins in the classics, and above all Virgil, but actually adopted from Spanish, French and Italian models. Indeed, the largest selection of any one author in this book is of Batholomew Yong, and his translations of Montemayor's Diana—a pastoral in verse and prose which was popular throughout Europe. It was not that these poets were actually much enamoured of nature or of the countryside: the pastoral style was like a suit of clothes that could be donned in order to express certain subjects—above all, love—without getting into hot water.
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Mary Coleridge Selected Poems
Shearsman
Classics Vol. 10
Published
September 2010. Paperback, 124pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848611399 Edited by Simon Avery. [Download a sample PDF from this
book here.]
Clearly suggesting the influence of poets such as Robert Browning, Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti, and paralleling the techniques of more modern poets like Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Mew and D.H. Lawrence, the poems of Mary Coleridge (1861–1907) have much to tell us about the shifting nature of poetry and poetics in the Victorian fin-de-siècle and early twentieth century and they certainly deserve to be more widely known than they currently are.
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