The Poems of Andrew Lang

Andrew Lang (1844-1912) made his name in the last quarter of the Victorian era in a remarkable number of literary and intellectual fields, as popular poet, influential literary critic, editor of the classic series of Fairy Books for the young, and as author of groundbreaking books on anthropology, Homeric scholarship, folklore and history. This is the first annotated edition of Lang’s poems, bringing together his books of verse and over 150 additional poems, many of them collected for the first time.

John Sloan’s introduction provides a compelling account of Lang’s achievements as a poet whose first two books of verse, Ballads and Lyrics of Old France and Ballades in Blue China, were a harbinger of the English aesthetic movement. Lang helped to create an abiding interest in French poetry and to encourage a new spirit of literary cosmopolitanism in England. He also widened the appeal of poetry in an age of new knowledge, advancing literacy and the growth of the popular press. The authoritative text is accompanied by extensive notes identifying important allusions and significant connections between the poems and Lang’s other writings. In the headnote to each poem, the reader will find a record of publication history, textual variants and sources, including details of the original sources of Lang’s verse translations from the French, Greek and Latin.

The edition offers an invaluable guide to the study of Lang’s poetry for students and scholars of nineteenth-century British poetry.

John Sloan received his doctorate from the University of Oxford, UK. He was C. U. F. Lecturer in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor in English at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, where he is now an Emeritus Fellow. His previous books include Oscar Wilde: Authors in Context (2003; reissued 2009) and the biography Andrew Lang: Writer, Folklorist, Democratic Intellect (2023).