Penguin's Poems for Life
Ratings1
Average rating4
Taking its inspiration from Shakespeare's idea of the "seven ages" of a human life, this new anthology brings together the best-loved poems in English to inspire, comfort and delight readers for a lifetime. Beginning with babies, the book is divided into sections on childhood, growing up, making a living and making love, family life, getting older, and approaching death, ending with poems of mourning and commemoration.Ranging from Chaucer to Carol Ann Duffy, via Shakespeare, Keats, and Lemn Sissay, this book offers something for each of those moments in life – whether falling in love, finding your first grey hair or saying your final goodbyes – when only a poem will do.
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
A nice sprinkle of poems for each of Shakespeare's seven ages of a life—that's the inspiration for this book. Everything you'd expect to be here is here. William Wordsworth's Ode (Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood). Kipling's If. Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach. Keats' To Autumn. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Auden's Funeral Blues. But there are light poems, too, like Jenny Joseph's Warning (“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple”) and Ogden Nash (“Candy is dandy”) and A. A. Milne (“When I was One, I had just begun.”
It's a good collection, but I think I'd have liked it better if it hadn't felt quite so heavy-handed, especially with old age. All in all, though, a very good collection.
