Oxford University Press sold a half-million copies of his
Oxford Book of English Verse (1900), which established the canon of English poetry in the twentieth century. He wrote introductions to the Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's plays, edited schoolbooks, and attracted large numbers of students to his lectures.
Although Q threatened to "haunt and hate" any biographer, one of his cardinal principles is that literature "cannot be understood apart from the men who have made it." Because he was essentially shy and reserved, his own attempt at autobiography is bland and uninformative. He asks in the preface to the last of the thirty-volume Duchy Edition (1928--1929) of his tales and romances that no memoir be written, since his stories contain "all of me that is worth preserving." In the preface to his novel Sir John Constantine (1905) he claims that if readers "would know anything of the writer ... [they] may find as much of him here as in any of his books." The novel is an extravagant farrago of coincidence, accident, mischance, derring-do, and high heroics in the style of Alain-René Lesage's Gil Blas (1715--1735), Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605--1615), or Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759--1767).
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