Sofa Spotlight - A Book of Narrative Verse, compiled by V. H. Collins

At last! I have been reading this book since March and it has been a drag. Just to give you an idea of my pain, have a glance at the list below that I have had to wade through (I've stared the ones that I liked):

The Nonne Preestes Tale - Geoffrey Chaucer
The Pardoners Tale - Geoffrey Chaucer

I don't know who wrote these:
King John and the Abbot of Canterbury
Sir Patrick Spens
Thomas the Rhymer
Edom o'Gordon
Young John
Jock o' the Side
Edward, Edward
Mary Ambree
The Battle of Otterburn

The Cave of Despair - Edmund Spenser
Sin and Death - John Milton
Cymon and Iphigenia - John Dryden
The Hermit - Thomas Parnell
The Rape of the Lock - Alexander Pope
*John Gilpin - William Cowper
Peter Grimes - George Crabbe
Tom o'Shanter - Robert Burns
*Michael - William Wordsworth
Flodden - Sir Walter Scott
*The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Prisoner of Chillon - Lord Byron
The Eve of St Agnes - John Keats
The Keeping of the Bridge - Lord Macaulay
Maud - Lord Tennyson
*Morte d'Arthur - Lord Tennyson
The Italian in England - Robert Browning
'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came' - Robert Browning
The Glove - Robert Browning
*Sohrab and Rustum - Matthew Arnold
The White Ship - Dante Gabriel Rossetti
*Atlanta's Race - William Morris
St. Dorothy - Algernon Charles Swinburne
The Ballad of 'Beau Brocade' - Austen Dobson
The Sacrilege - Thomas Hardy
Ticonderoga - Robert Louis Stevenson
A Ballad of John Nicolson
Tomlinson - Rudyard Kipling
The Battle of Stamford Bridge - Laurence Binyon
Lepanto - Gilbert Keith Chesterton
John Masefield - The Rider at the Gate
*The Highwayman - Alfred Noyes

I suppose that poetry lovers out there would see heaven in that list. As you can see I didn't like much of what I read, although I liked Wordsworth, so maybe not all is lost. What surprise me about Atlanta's Race is that it reminded me of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Wonderbook & Tanglewood Tales and that may have been why I enjoyed it.

 My favourite was The Highwayman although that probably has more to do with hearing my Dad recite it when I was a child. I think that for me it might be that I need to hear the poetry out loud in order to appreciate it. However, I am not quite ready to put this theory to the test just yet. A break is required, lasting some time.

What do you think of the above list? Have you read any of them, what did you think of what you read? I am more than willing to have my mind changed, but I'm not sure it will happen.