Francis Turner Palgrave

Francis Turner Palgrave 1824-97, English poet and anthologist; oldest son of Sir Francis Palgrave. Educated at Oxford, where he began his lifelong friendship with Tennyson, he was an official in the government education department until he became professor of poetry (1885-95) at Oxford. He is remembered as the editor of a famous anthology, The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861). Its revised version and his many other anthologies were also popular. Of his own verse, The Visions of England (1881) and a few hymns are the best.

Bibliography: See biography by G. F. Palgrave (1899).

Palgrave, Francis Turner (1824–97), professor of poetry at Oxford, 1885–95. He is chiefly remembered for his anthology The Golden Treasury of Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861; 2nd series, 1897). In the selection for the first edition Palgrave was advised by his close friend Tennyson; it contained no work by living poets, and is a reflection of the taste of the age (e.g. no Donne and no Blake, though work by these poets and later writers was added to subsequent editions). Palgrave compiled other anthologies and selections, and published several volumes of his own verse.