Golden Treasury

FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE was born in 1824 and educated at Charterhouse and Balliol College, Oxford. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1885-1895. A practising poet and friend of the poet laureate, Alfred Tennyson, he is best remembered for this famous anthology. He died in 1897.

• Frontispiece Foreword; A. Motion , Poet Laureate Dedication Preface Book I Book II Book III Book IV Notes Index of Writers Index of First Lines

'The theme of National Poetry Day...is fresh voices, but there's an opportunity to celebrate some old ones, too. Palgrave, Macmillan's newly renamed academic list, is reissuing a facsimile edition of the book from which the list takes its name, Palgrave's Golden Treasury. First published in 1861 at the suggestion of Tennyson, then Poet Laureate, the anthology had sold 650,000 copies by 1939. The reissue has a foreword by the present Laureate, Andrew Motion.' - The Literator, The Independent'I'm not sure that any book has ever truly changed my life in the sense of dramatically altering its course, but I can think of one that determined it, and that's Palgrave's Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language. It was my mother's book and she read to me from it, as I imagine, in the dark. It was from Palgrave that I learned that literature had a sound, that language mattered more than story, that rhythm haunted the imagination, and that love and grief and loneliness interested me more than any other subject.' - Howard Jacobson, The Guardian