EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POETRY AND THE GOLDEN TREASURY THE PUBLISHERS OF EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY WILL BE PLEASED TO SEND FREELY TO ALL APPLICANTS A LIST OF THE PUBLISHED AND PROJECTED VOLUMES TO BE COMPRISED UNDER THE FOLLOWING THIRTEEN HEADINGS: IN FOUR STYLES OF BINDING: CLOTH, FLAT BACK, COLOURED TOP; LEATHER, ROUND CORNERS, GILT TOP; LIBRARY BINDING IN CLOTH, & QUARTER PIGSKIN LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS, LTD. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. FIRST ISSUE OF THIS EDITION REPRINTED April 1906 September 1906; May 1907; College PR 1175 Pizi INTRODUCTION 19062 "THE future of poetry," says Matthew Arnold in that essay on the study of poetry which he wrote for Mr. T. H. Ward's "English Poets "-" the future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a work of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry." Well, is not that a curiously elaborate way of sayingwith something of the insistence of the school-master, too, his eagerness to explain himself-just what Aristotle has said perfectly once for all, for "there is more truth in Poetry than in History"? And if this be so, as indeed we cannot doubt, truth, as Aristotle conceived it, including all real things, as joy and sorrow and beauty, such a book as "The Golden Treasury of English Lyric Poetry" should be really one of the most precious books in the world. Rather than any other anthology of English verse, it has been accepted for what it is, a sort of canon as it were of English poetry within which nothing of doubtful quality or achievement is to be found, a perfect chaplet of beautiful verses. Amended here and there, added to and considered again and again as it has been from time to time, its perfection was implicit in the first edition, published strangely enough vii 1116163 Col. Lib. |