The text of this collection of poetry is authentic and not bowdlerized.
The general reader will, I hope, be gratified to find that its pages
display no pedantic or scholastic traits. His pleasure in the poetry
itself will not be distracted by a marginal numbering of the lines; by
index-figures and footnotes; or by antiquated peculiarities of spelling,
capitalization, and elision. Except where literal conventions are
essential to the poet's purpose,--as in _The Castle of Indolence, The
Schoolmistress_, or Chatterton's poems,--I have followed modern usage.
Dialect words are explained in the glossary; and the student who may wish
to consult the context of any passage will find the necessary references
in the unusually full table of contents. Whenever the title of a poem
gives too vague a notion of its substance, or whenever its substance is
miscellaneous, I have supplied [bracketed] captions for the extracts;
except for these, there is nothing on the pages of the text besides the
poets' own words.
Originality is not the proper characteristic of an anthologist, and in
the choice of extracts I have rarely indulged my personal likings when
they conflicted with time-honored preferences; yet this anthology,--the
first published in a projected series of four or five volumes comprising
the English poets from Elizabethan to Victorian times,--has certain minor
features that may be deemed objectionably novel. Much the greater portion
of the volume has of course, as usual, been given to those poems (by
Pope, Thomson, Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, Crabbe, Cowper, and Burns) which
have been loved or admired from their day to our own. But I have ventured
to admit also a few which, though forgotten to-day, either were popular
in the eighteenth century or possess marked historical significance. In
other words, I present not solely what the twentieth century considers
enduringly great in the poetry of the eighteenth, but also a
little--proportionately very little--of what the eighteenth century
itself (perhaps mistakenly) considered interesting. This secondary
purpose accounts for my inclusion of passages from such neglected authors
as Mandeville, Brooke, Day, and Darwin. The passages of this sort are too
infrequent to annoy him who reads for aesthetic pleasure only; and to the
student they will illustrate movements in the spirit of the age which
would otherwise be unrepresented, and which, as the historical
introduction points out, are an integral part of its thought and feeling.
The inclusion of passages from "Ossian," though almost unprecedented,
requires, I think, no defense against the literal-minded protest that
they are written in "prose."
Students of poetical history will find it illuminating to read the
passages in chronological order (irrespective of authorship); and in
order to facilitate this method I have given in the table of contents the
date of each poem.