[1][2] In choosing the poems for their anthology, Alington and Lyttelton adopted the following principles: The book was first published by Macmillan in London in 1925, with a second impression in 1927 and a third in 1938.
There are fewer poems in this section by the best-known names in English poetry, but Alington and Lyttelton include William Blake's "The Tiger" and Rudyard Kipling's "A Smuggler's Song": "Five and twenty ponies, Trotting through the dark".
Though agreeing that the metre is "almost indispensable for comic purposes", the editors also selected serious examples, by among others Matthew Prior, Isaac Watts and Robert Browning – "The Lost Leader": "Just for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a riband to stick in his coat".
In their introduction to this section, the editors acknowledge that English hexameters and pentameters are, by the nature of modern ideas of scansion, not strictly comparable with classical examples.
Once again they begin their choice with Chaucer, who is followed by a large selection of English, Scottish, Irish and American verse in a wide variety of metres and shapes.
In this section, Alington and Lyttelton included poets as diverse as Edmund Spenser, the two Sir Walter Raleighs, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick and twentieth-century poets including John Masefield and W. B. Yeats, alongside writers of comic verse such as A. D. Godley and W. S. Gilbert, who is represented by three lyrics from the Savoy Operas.
This is the largest section of the anthology, and it was praised by the reviewer of The Manchester Guardian as the most likely to fulfil the editors' wish to attract young people's interest.
What then of Drayton's great sonnet, or Meredith's 'Lucifer in Starlight', or Donne's 'An Anatomy of the World', or Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale', or Browning's 'My Last Duchess', to mention no more?".