The Oxford Book of Travel Verse

As pilgrims, missionaries, explorers, soldiers, diplomats, merchants, and tourists, the British have for centuries ventured forth to see the world. Great poets such as Marvell, Shelley, Coleridge, and Rossetti, as well as many other lesser known lyricists have recorded excursions abroad in their poetry. Brought together for the first time in an anthology that will delight and inspire both the adventurous traveler and the armchair dreamer, this collection charts the British experience abroad over five centuries as reflected in their verse.
Covering many continents and countries and including poets as varied as John Betjeman, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lawrence Durrell, Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, Stephen Spender, Oscar Wilde, and D.J. Enright, this marvelous anthology reveals not only the various motives which drove the British to travel abroad, but also, by arranging the poems geographically, exposes historical relationships, prejudices, and predilections.