INTRODUCTION

I

THE attempt is made in this collection to bring together the best short poems in the English language from the time of Spenser to the present day, together with a body of verse which, if not great poetry, has at least the distinction of wide popularity. In what degree this attempt has been successful the book itself must show; but it may be worth while to state briefly certain purposes which the compiler had in mind when he undertook the task, and which he has carried out as faithfully as he could.

These purposes were to include nothing which did not seem to him to ring true, but, at the same time, to recognize the validity of popular taste as well as of classical taste; to preserve in authentic form certain fugitive poems which everyone admires but which few know where to find; to lay emphasis upon the lighter forms of verse; and to pay especial attention to the work of living English and American poets, particularly of the younger generation.

It would be idle to suppose that everything included here will appeal to everyone as good poetry. Tastes in poetry differ even more inevitably than tastes in food; but the compiler has tried to spread his table in such a manner that every healthy taste may be abundantly satisfied without having to eat of any dish it does not care for. In one respect, he is free to confess that, in arranging the banquet, he has not relied upon his own taste alone. There is a note of pensive sentiment-the note which Longfellow knew how to strike so successfully-which, according to Professor Trent, "finds an echo in the universal human heart," and this note the compiler did not feel justified in disregarding, or even regarding lightly, simply because his own heart happens to be indifferent to it. Nor has he been deterred from using a poem because it was the common

property of anthologists, or tempted to include any because it was little known. For this is a collection, not of curious or unusual, but of favorite verse.

There will be much difference of opinion as to the merit of the selections from the work of living writers included here. Where the test of time is not available, and the stamp of wide approval is withheld, there remains only the test of individual preference, and here the compiler has consulted no judgment but his own. He has been hampered by human limitations as applied to a mass of material so overwhelming in bulk; but he hopes that the selection will be found fairly representative, and that no really great poem of recent years has been overlooked. And while the restrictions of copyright have somewhat limited the representation given certain American poets, he believes that American verse, as a whole, receives far more attention here than in any other general anthology.

II

Practically the first decision the compiler made with regard to this work was that it should be a collection, not of fragments, but of complete poems; and this, while it did not, of course, preclude the use of poems within poems-of lyrics from the dramatists, of songs from Scott's metrical romances, or of such parentheses as Byron's stanzas on Waterloo-while it did not prevent the excision of such obvious digressions as the final stanzas of Timrod's "Spring," and while it was not construed to mean that a sequence such as "Sonnets from the Portuguese" must be given entire, has, nevertheless, resulted in some deprivations. No passages will be found here from any of Shakespeare's plays, no stanzas from the "Fairy Queen," no lines from "Paradise Lost." But the compiler feels that such loss, if it be a loss, is more than counterbalanced by the satisfaction of knowing that, throughout the book, one gets complete the poet's thought, as he embodied it in his verse.

The decision to give every poem entire has resulted in a few exclusions from another cause than that of length; for in some lyrics, especially of Restoration days, there is oc

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casionally a line or stanza too free for modern taste. It is for this reason that Suckling's inimitable "Ballad of a Wedding" will not be found between these covers, since it contains one stanza certainly, and perhaps three or four, not fitted for a "Home Book of Verse." A few other poems which had got through the winnowing as far as the first proofs, were finally cut out for the same reason, rather than presented in a mangled or Bowdlerized version.

And, as already mentioned, the enforcement of copyright restrictions has prevented the use of a small number of poems which the compiler wished to include. There are a few publishers who seem to regard with pronounced disfavor any collection such as this, and who will permit the use of poems which they control either not at all, or only upon conditions which are, in effect, prohibitive. Because of this, the admirers of Henry Cuyler Bunner will look in vain through these pages for any example of his delicate art; and for the same reason a few other American poets are either absent altogether or only meagerly represented. But the losses from this cause are unimportant when compared with the great body of the work, and the compiler feels that he has little reason to complain. For the most part, his requests for copyright permissions have been granted with a most gratifying courtesy and generosity.

III

Great care has been taken to secure accuracy of text, à task whose difficulty only the anthologist can appreciate. In so far as possible, the copy used was taken from the standard editions of the various poets; and where there was any question of authenticity, as in the case of fugitive poems, the poem, if the author was living and could be found, was submitted to him for correction. In the older poems, where there were varied readings of equal authority, the editor has used that which seemed to him the best; and where there have been repeated revisions of a poem, that has been chosen which seemed the better version. This has not been, in every case, the final version; for, as in the case of Coates Kinney's "Rain on the Roof," over-refinement

has sometimes destroyed the spontaneity of the earlier work.

The spelling has been modernized throughout, as there seemed no reason to preserve an archaism not intended by the poet; and such eccentricities of spelling as various writers affected have been made to conform to the accepted American usage. The numbering of stanzas has been omitted as unnecessary and cumbersome. In every case where a short poem has been taken from a longer one, a line has been added to indicate its source, and where the author himself did not supply a title for his poem, the present editor has usually preferred to quote the first line as the title, rather than use a title invented by someone else. In the old ballads, a modern version has been used in preference to the earliest one, which would be unintelligible to many readers; and the use of the apostrophe to indicate an imaginary shortening of a syllable has been done away with. As a matter of fact, there is, for example, no real difference between the pronunciation of "kiss'd," "kist" and "kissed," and so no reason why the regular spelling should not be used.

IV

The classification used in this volume has been made to fit the poems, and not the poems the classification. In other words, with the exception of some of the children's verse, the work of selection was completed before that of classification was begun. The compiler can claim for it no fundamental originality, since most poetry falls into certain well-recognized classes; but he has tried to make it more searching and exhaustive than is usually attempted. He has tried, for instance, to group the poems dealing with the emotions not only by meaning, but by shades of meaning, so that one poem would seem naturally to suggest the next. This has, of course, been a task too fine for accomplishment with anything like complete success; but, as he has looked through the final proofs, he has been conscious of at least a few happy juxtapositions.

Classification is a nerve-racking task, and, even at the best, must sometimes be purely arbitrary; as, for example,

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where the present compiler has placed his selection from Meredith's "Modern Love" under "Love Sonnets." For Meredith's stanzas are not sonnets at all, since they consist of sixteen lines each; and yet they have essentially a sonnet effect, and their place seemed to be with the other famous sequences. Then, too, there are many poems which may equally well be placed under various headings, so that it was, more or less, an arbitrary decision which placed "The Courtin'" under "The Comedy of Love" rather than with the humorous poems, and "Kathleen Mavourneen" under "The Parted Lovers" rather than "At Her Window."

And, however complete the classification may be, the anthologist must inevitably, at the end, find himself with a number of poems on his hands which belong distinctly nowhere, and which must yet go somewhere. It has been rather the fashion to solve the difficulty by putting them anywhere; but the present compiler has chosen, rather than break the continuity of arrangement, to set up, in one section of Part VI, a sort of scrap-bag in which these odds and ends are assembled.

V

Where every collection such as this must fail of complete success, as representing the whole field of English poetry, is that it exalts the writers of brief lyrics at the expense of the writers of long odes and epics and narrative poems. Such poets as Milton, Pope and Collins do not loom as large in these pages as their stature merits; to attempt to represent Shakespeare by a few of his songs and sonnets, or Swift by an epigram, is manifestly absurd; so that this collection can claim to be adequate only as a representation of English lyric poetry. That, it is hoped, it will be found to besomething more than that, indeed, since many of the more famous longer poems are also included; and it should be valuable, too, as bringing together in one index a wide range of verse not to be found in the average private library. In closing this resumé of a task which has occupied some three years in the doing, the compiler wishes to acknowledge his deep indebtedness for many kindnesses to the living writers whose work is represented here. They have been