INTRODUCTION

THE design of this Anthology is simple and unambitious. Arranged chronologically in three sections, the book is intended primarily not for readers who already have an extensive acquaintance with the English poets and are familiar with the anthologies of the past, but, rather, for those for whom it may be a convenience to find in one volume a small, but representative, selection of English poetry from its beginnings until to-day. The choice of poems has been guided by individual taste necessarily, and the informed critic, for whom the selection was not made, will doubtless note the omission of some poets altogether. In no case can it be pretended that in a volume of this scope the quality of a poet has been more than suggested, but it may be hoped that a reader who is discovering that poetry is not the prerogative of one or two favourite authors, or of a particular time, but rather, and in our language particularly, the common glory of genius through many centuries, will find familiarity with this volume no bad counsel on the way.

The first section of the book consists of a small gathering from the immense treasure of English lyric. If I have in many cases included a poet's most familiar work, it is, as I say, remembering that the book is to be read chiefly by people to whom poetry is not yet familiar at all. If it should fall into the hands of others they will not complain of the occasion to renew an old pleasure. Had the volume been intended primarily for scholarship my selection would have

been more adventurous, and as an earnest of this there is to be published at the same time as this book a small anthology of pieces gathered from almost unknown, or forgotten, poets of the seventeenth century, a period to which I have paid some particular attention, as other periods will doubtless be more fully served by others. Here and there in the present anthology I have inserted a song or so from one of these unrenowned, but for the present purpose they had necessarily in general to give way to more obvious claims. The second section shows the poets generally in a more reflective and elegiac mood, and in rather more elaborate flights than are to be found in the first. And in the third is what in the circumstances must be an almost arbitrary choice from the long poems in which English poetry is as rich as in lyric, though the way of public taste sometimes obscures the fact.

Epic and dramatic poetry have necessarily had to be omitted. Selections from King Lear or Paradise Lost are useless. A more serious difficulty has been the case of a poet like Chaucer. As a narrative poet he is perhaps the master of them all, and yet the objection to including one of his tales was that it was too long and also that even so it was but part of a whole. The logic of this reasoning may not be perfect, but compromise was inevitable in places, and this was one of them. Some poets of admirable quality, as, for example, Edward Young and Joseph Addison, are at their best only at considerable length, and their long pieces could find no place among others of wider merit. And poets like Pope, Crabbe, and Shakespeare himself can be but inadequately represented. Gold