Selected Poems

Dryden’s famous elegy on John Oldham (1653-83) was one of many tributes to the ‘Marcellus of our tongue’:

Farewel, too little and too lately known, Whom I began to think and call my own; For sure our souls were nearly ally’d; and thine Cast in the sam Poetick mould with mine.

Many other critics and poets have found Oldham’s work worthy of their attention, including Ezra Pound, who praised the ‘cantabile’ quality of Oldham’s own elegy on his friend John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. However, that attention has until now been denied the general reader by the lack of a readily available selection. The Penguin Companion to Literature notes that ‘there is no good modern edition or critical essay’: Ken Robinson has supplied both, offering not only the first selection of Oldham’s poetry, but also an authoritative text based on a collation of early editions and Oldham’s autograph manuscript.

Ken Robinson’s introduction isolates the characteristics of Oldham’s poetry and places the selection in the context of both his works as a whole and the Restoration period in general.