The Story of Poetry: English poets from Skelton to Dryden, by Michael Schmidt

English poets laid bare by a mechanic of verse

This is the second volume in a series. The first charted the history of English poetry from its beginnings to the 15th century; the second takes us from the 16th century to the end of the 17th. Each book is both a critical introduction to English verse and the editor's anthology of some of the best of it.

Michael Schmidt himself is well qualified to undertake such a task: he professes poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University; he edits the well-regarded PN Review; and he is an editor of poetry as well as an accomplished poet in his own right.

The first book was marred by the dullness of some of its verse: how to do some justice to the interminable Lydgate, for example. Poetry in English was getting on its feet; but its knee joints cracked from time to time.

This is not the case with this glorious period. In fact, the middle of it – say, 1550 to 1650 – is perhaps the greatest and most intimidating moment in English poetry. Intimidating, that is, to those who continue to wrestle with the Muse.

We are faced with an embarrassment of riches this time around: Spenser, Raleigh, Donne, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Milton, etc. English literature is both coherent at last and dauntingly accomplished.

The first great poet represented is the anarchic and ribald John Skelton, a great coiner of new words and a man who gave voice to a common spoken language. Among the last is the dazzling, emotionally limited John Dryden, professional poet par excellence. At this point, poetry collides with the terrible wall of Decorum, which doesn't get dismantled for about a hundred years.

Schmidt's 200-page commentary, which serves as a preface to the anthology, is (as before) forceful and for the most part peppered with crisp, sound judgements. We read him not for irrelevant biographical tittle-tattle, but for careful attention to poets and their poems. He shows us how poems work rather in the way that oily-fingered mechanics strip down a car engine, grinning all the way. The writing is swift, occasionally pell-mell, and always to the point.

Schmidt keeps us aware not only of the craft of poetry, but of the messy and often unjust business of publishing and selling it too. This is both refreshing and enlightening. The only poet who gets less than his due is that great gadfly John Donne, whom Schmidt regards as self-regarding and, finally, lacking in coherence. Fortunately, extracts in the anthology give Donne the last, baleful laugh.

This book is about the great age of lyric and elegies, and contains many near-perfect examples. It throws up some forgotten names – a near-mad post-metaphysical called Edward Taylor, for example. It has just one major problem, the same that faced Arthur Quiller-Couch almost 100 years ago, when he came to compile the Oxford Book of English Verse. Because of the strict terms of its remit, there is no dramatic verse in this book. A true representation of English poetry in the 17th century without verse extracts from the great Elizabethan and Jacobean plays? That has to be a nonsense.