Front cover image for The Oxford book of the sea

The Oxford book of the sea

Jonathan Raban (Editor)
It is no surprise that one of the earliest works in English literature should be a poem about the sea: the sea has been a source of fascination from the earliest times, and the Anglo-Saxon poem 'The Seafarer' is only the first in a long series of writings which ponder its mystery. A powerful and restless presence in real life, the sea is one of the most ubiquitous and protean symbols in literature, changing in response to shifts in sensibility, and holding a mirror to all who confront it--Renaissance explorers and Augustan gentlemen, Romantic outcasts and Victorian travellers, packet tourists and small-boat sailors, naturalists and novelists, poets and oceanographers: men and women in a state of wonder before the sea
Print Book, English, 1992
Oxford University Press, Oxford [England], 1992
poetry
xviii, 524 pages ; 23 cm
9780192141972, 019214197X
24142302
Anon. from 'The Seafarer'
Edmund Spenser (c.1552-1599). from The Faerie Queene
Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616). Edward Hay's account of Sir Humphrey Gilbert's voyage to. Newfoundland from Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation
The English Bible (1611). from Psalm 107
George Chapman (1559-1634). from Homer's Odysseys
Samuel Purchas (c.1575-1626). from Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes
John Donne (1572-1631). 'The Storme'. 'The Calme'
John Milton (1608-1674). from 'Lycidas'. from The Book of Common Prayer
John Dryden (1631-1700). from Annus Mirabilis
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (c.1624-1674). 'The Sea-goddess'
Charles Cotton (1630-1687). 'The Tempest'
Joseph Addison (1672-1719). from The Spectator
Daniel Defoe (c. 1660- 1731). from Robinson Crusoe. from A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790). from Journal of a Voyage
James Thomson (1700-1748)