34 poets, British and American (Oxford 2004-2009)

Christopher Ricks was Oxford Professor of Poetry between 2004 and 2009, and during his tenure arranged for 30 poets, half of them British and half American, to read from their work.

This anthology features work by all of those poets, a mixture of the established and the new. The poets include Susan Barbour, Caroline Bird, Carmen Bugan, Kate Clanchy, Jane Draycott, John Fuller, Jenny Lewis, Peter McDonald, Patrick McGuinness, Lucy Newlyn, Bernard O'Donoghue, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Jon Stallworthy, Kieron Winn, Constantine Contogenis, Greg Delanty, David Ferry, Mark Halliday, Saskia Hamilton, George Kalogeris, Marcia Karp, Jill McDonough, Ted Richer, Don Share, John Talbot, Harry Thomas, Rosanna Warren, and Rachel Wetzsteon.

There will also be a coda to the anthology containing poems by older poets associated with Oxford University: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Thwaite, Elizabeth Jennings, Jonathan Price and Adrian Mitchell.

Christopher Ricks is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, where he is co-director of the university's Editorial Institute. He was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 2004, and is known both for his critical studies and for his editorial work. The latter includes The Poems of Tennyson (Longmans, revised 1989), The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (Oxford University Press, 1987), Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 by T. S. Eliot (Faber & Faber, 1996), The Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford University Press, 1999), Selected Poems of James Henry (Handsel, 2002), and Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems (Library of America, 2005). In 2002 he delivered the Panizzi Lectures in Bibliography at the British Library. He is the General Editor of Poetry for Penguin Classics, and a co-editor of Essays in Criticism. He is currently undertaking a full critical edition of T. S. Eliot's complete poems, to be published by Faber & Faber. For his services to scholarship he was knighted in 2009.