The appearance of the 1999 Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Christopher Ricks, makes us ask about the 1972 New Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Helen Gardner. Since they are both anthologies of centuries of poetry, there is a lot of overlap. But there are a lot of differences too. In order to include modern poems (Gardner stops at 1950), Ricks has had to cut, and some of my favorite poems did not make the cut: Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar", Keats's Last Sonnet, and Yeats's "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death", to name just three.

With "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift", both books excerpt, and just what is excerpted is instructive. I prefer Ricks here. And Ricks's preservation of spelling and punctuation is in my opinion a better choice, though he then goes and leaves out Coleridge's marginal notes in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

So, if you care about poetry, you need both books. Where they are different, they are both valuable. Where they are the same, they are not quite the same, and a comparison proves instructive. Or at least it has so proved to me.

My nightstand is small, so only a few books can fit. The space is reserved for those trusted friends that I turn to late at night, or when I'm sick. Gardner's volume is among them.

This anthology covers 900 pages of verse from Great Brittain, in a variety of styles and subjects. As an introduction to the deep range of English poetry, it had very few peers, and the only rival in taste in selection (both what is included and excluded) is the 5-volume anthology Auden & Pearson did for the Viking/Penguin Portables. Buy it; read it, a little at a time or straight through; reread it. You won't be disappointed.

Four Quartets is unarguably Eliot's masterpiece, one of the last things he wrote. It is a notoriously difficult work to read, but Helen Gardner is the authority on the matter.

Although I don't find her writing style to be as accessible as Reibetanz's book on the Four Quartets, she will help anyone to a deeper understanding of these beautiful, philosophical poems. Unfortunately such books tend to be out of print, but if you can find a copy somewhere and you want to come to a better understanding of Eliot's poems, grab it! Otherwise check your library.