I should think you must have observed, in the course of your reading, that
even in the most accredited organs of opinion, principles of literary
criticism, either explicitly stated or tacitly assumed, are often utterly
ignored, in the notice of some work or other in the self-same number. The
result can only be to create confusion in the public mind.
In this volume, consisting of papers written at various times during the
last thirty years, no such contradiction will, I think, be found. Whether
they be deemed sound or otherwise, they are at least coherent; the canons
of criticism underlying them being that no verse which is unmusical or
obscure can be regarded as Poetry, whatever other qualities it may
possess; that Imagination in Poetry, as distinguished from mere Fancy, is
the transfiguring of the Real, or actual, into the Ideal, by what Prospero
calls his "so potent art"; and, if these conditions are complied with,
that the greatness of the poem depends on the greatness of the theme.
To no one so much as to you am I indebted for criticism of the frankest
kind. That alone would lead me to ask you to accept the dedication of
these pages. But I find a yet further and stronger impulse to do so, in
the long and uninterrupted friendship that has subsisted between us, and
to which I attach so much value.
Believe me always,
Yours most sincerely,
ALFRED AUSTIN.
SWINFORD OLD MANOR,
_January 1910_.