He has compiled as daring and important a book as Lonsdale's New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse or Ricks' New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, and it deserves to have as great a success ...this magnificent, heartening book ... In handing the whole poetry of the past back to the range of people who wrote it, Jones has passed it forward to us. - Andrew Motion, The Observer
    
For general and specialist readers - and also for poets - there are things in these 700 and more pages of verse that will quicken the pulses, as they bring home a sense of the immense resources and variety of our poetic inheritance. - Charles Tomlinson, The Independent
   
I wouldn't consider it either easy or desirable to read most anthologies straight through, but I did this one, with an intensifying excitement . . . Every now and again, an anthology is published which is also a real book. That is, the editor's selection shows us new ways of reading a poetry. Such a work is The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse, edited by Emrys Jones: it is like first-class history, only better because it consists of all the data, and we draw the conclusions for ourselves. This is a volume, then, that being both inclusive and interpretive may be read for pleasure or required as a textbook. And such are its virtues that it might well be used as a handbook in styles by the beginning poet. - Thom Gunn, Times Literary Supplement
    
the selection of poems in Emrys Jones's New Oxford Book of 16th-Century Verse is quite splendid, a veritable treasure house ... there are no shocking omissions to deprecate, and if some of the poems are lengthy it is because they are long poems ... this New Oxford Book of 16th-Century Verse is to be resoundingly recommended. - London Review of Books
    
this anthology is a true companion, which pays readers the compliment of treating them as adults; and reminds them of the value of many substances other than gold, which even Midas grew tired of. - The Economist
    
offers a quietly authoritative selection, extending the canon of Tudor poetry far beyond the hey-nonny-no of earlier anthologists ... It proves the 1590s were the most remarkable decade of English literary history. - Keith Thomas, The Observer
   
This book makes a radically fresh selection. - Cahiers Elisabethains
    
very difficult to fault for the selections he has made in the generous and typically English ... bouquet he offers in The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth-Century Verse ... gives us a whole new way of looking at the poetry of the period and does ample justice to the great riches of the Elizabethan era - Bibliotheque D'Humanisme et Renaissance