If you had to choose a selection of poems to represent your country’s past, which ones would you pick? What can poetry teach us about a nation’s history, culture and identity? These are some of the questions Catherine Clarke sets out to answer in this wonderful new book which tells the story of England through twenty-five famous and not-so-famous poems.

Beginning with the 8th century poem Cædmon’s Hymn, written in Old English, the book then moves chronologically through time, ending with Zaffar Kunial’s The Groundsman from 2022. Familiar names including Geoffrey Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tennyson and Lewis Carroll are all represented, but so are some lesser known poets from more diverse backgrounds such as Phillis Wheatley, the first African-American woman to have her poems published, and Grace Nichols, an immigrant to Britain from Guyana. The poems have all been selected for what they can tell us about specific moments in English history: Viking raids, the Battle of Agincourt, the plague, the miners’ strikes, the Great Storm of 1987 and many more.

Before picking up this book, it’s important to know that it shouldn’t really be approached as simply a poetry anthology. Not all of the poems appear in full – many are just extracts – and they haven’t necessarily been chosen for the beauty of the language. The literary merit of each poem is discussed only briefly or not at all, as Clarke is more interested in the life of the writer, why they chose to write that particular poem at that particular time and how the poem fits into the wider context of what was happening in England during that period. Each poem is given its own chapter and with twenty-five of them to get through, the chapters are relatively short, although still long enough to say everything that needs to be said.

I enjoyed every chapter – although I was already familiar with most of the historical figures and topics discussed in the book, it was interesting to see them from different, unusual perspectives and to discover some new poems I’d never read before. Some of my favourites were Mary Leapor’s Crumble Hall, written through the eyes of a servant in an 18th century country house; Adlestrop by Edward Thomas, describing a train briefly stopping at a station in 1914; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s The Cry of the Children, a protest against child labour during the Industrial Revolution.

I can highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in English history. If you also like poetry it would be helpful, but not essential! I thought it was a fascinating approach and it would be good to read about another country’s history seen through the lens of its poetry like this.

Thanks to Penguin Classics/Allen Lane for providing a copy of this book via NetGalley.