Palgrave’s Golden Treasury: Book Review

The title of the book suggests too many things about the content. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury – most of the readers should already know that it is a poetry collection with many hundreds of poems by more than 150 English poets who wrote in different centuries. It is a book that every reader who loves reading English poems must have. Students of literature, enthusiasts of literature and anyone with an interest in getting an overview of English poetry will enjoy reading this wonderful book which is called ‘treasury’. As the name suggests, it was initially published by Francis Turner Palgrave and the initial edition came out in the year 1861. Since 19th-century, the book has undergone several changes made by several editors and has seen many editions.

Golden Treasury has a distinct quality. It will save you from being overpowered by only one kind of poems. You have whole the world in front of yourself that you can explore. It has poems from Shakespeare, Marlowe, T. S. Eliot, Hardy, Keats, Yeats… in short, it begins what was started centuries ago as English poetry and it gets you to the world we live today – with poems by the current generation poets. You will not only have an idea of how it went with the evolution of English poetry, but you will also feel that your grasp on understanding poetry with its context have enriched itself.

The poems in this book generally begin with Elizabethan English poetry and move with a straight line movement as you might expect. The poets keep appearing on the pages as per their timelines and it really makes the job for a literature student very convenient in finding out the common causes, a collective theme and also understand the style of the poets. For example, a student can easily read the poets of Victorian Age and find out the sentiment and the root logic of poetry of that age by reading the likes of Tennyson, Arnold, Browning and others. The same stands for any other age. Golden Treasury makes the task easier because it lines up the poets in a convenient order.

For common readers who read poetry just to enjoy it, there is very much in the poetry collection which will keep them uplifted. As a common reader, you will find that you can read romantic poetry, melancholy, spiritual uprising, religious poems, rebellious poems and so on… all in one book. You can learn how to identify poetry and associate it with the age of production by regularly reading the poems. You can also learn to identify the trademark styles of the poets you like reading. It will help you in reading more poems by them because you become accustomed to their style.

The ideal readers of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury are people with interest in English poetry, students of English literature and anyone with an interest in reading good books which are more than simply being useful – interesting and exciting. Are you ready for the poetic pages? You can get the latest edition of this collection from Amazon by clicking the link below:

Buy the book – click here to buy from Amazon

Review by AM for Indian Book Critics