By heart Book

By Heart is a compendium of poetry of Hughes' favourites, within his 'Sacred Canon' (ie copious amounts of Shakespeare, Yeats, Blake, Eliot, and Hopkins, romantics aside), and others, collected for the purpose of memorising, using a more traditional process which he details in his introduction in familiar Hughes fashion: rambling about Pagan-Catholicism and the desecration of the Poet-Goddess by the enlightenment etc etc etc etc...

Some of these are well over 3 pages and seem to be here either because he just wanted them to be, or because they are actually ones he has memorised ' the audiobook cassette for this volume doesn't give any hints as to whether he delivers them read or from memory.
I personally feel its pretty clear that most of these names have a presence in Hughes' work, and you can feel his own in the poems (besides Eliot, whom I feel nothing from). The bulk of the anthology is generally "classical" poets to today, with some moderns like Betjeman and Larkin creeping in, which I wasn't particularly happy about, but he has managed to turn me around in my impressions of Blake and Auden, which is greatly appreciated. The themes seem relatively scatter brained in the first quarter, but eventually the clear Hughes taste arises, being more perennial or mythical pieces, or simply folk pieces such as 'Donal Og' translated by Lady Gregory, probably my favourite from this whole collection along with the closer 'A Musical Instrument' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

The arrangement seems somewhat random, though there will occasionally be small groupings of 2-3 poems with similar themes or subjects.

While this anthology sets out, in a quite novel way, to act as a poetry-memorising guide with handy selection of works to try it out on, most readers will likely seek this book to get an insight to Hughes' own taste ' it sort of acts like a more varied distillation of all of his selected poems of older writers (his Shakespeare, Douglas, Dickinson, etc. selections) while getting some one-off names and reduced risk of wasted reading time on poets you don't enjoy.

A great insight and generally great anthology (the first I've read actually), but with sadly little Coleridge or Chaucer as I would expect.