Project Gutenberg Etext/Project Gutenberg Book of English Verse
orThe Project Gutenberg Etext of Bulchevy's Book of English Verse
Previously released as:
The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Oxford Book of English Verse
Chosen and Edited by
Arthur Quiller-Couch
FOR this Anthology I have tried to range over the whole field ofEnglish Verse from the beginning, or from the Thirteenth Centuryto this closing year of the Nineteenth, and to choose the best.Nor have I sought in these Islands only, but wheresoever the Musehas followed the tongue which among living tongues she mostdelights to honour. To bring home and render so great a spoilcompendiously has been my capital difficulty. It is for the readerto judge if I have so managed it as to serve those who alreadylove poetry and to implant that love in some young minds not yetinitiated.
My scheme is simple. I have arranged the poets as nearly aspossible in order of birth, with such groupings of anonymouspieces as seemed convenient. For convenience, too, as well as toavoid a dispute-royal, I have gathered the most of the Balladsinto the middle of the Seventeenth Century; where they fill alanguid interval between two winds of inspiration—the Italiandying down with Milton and the French following at the heels ofthe restored Royalists. For convenience, again, I have set myselfcertain rules of spelling. In the very earliest poems inflectionand spelling are structural, and to modernize is to destroy. Butas old inflections fade into modern the old spelling becomes lessand less vital, and has been brought (not, I hope, too abruptly)into line with that sanctioned by use and familiar. To do thisseemed wiser than to discourage many readers for the sake ofdiverting others by a scent of antiquity which—to be essential—should breathe of something rarer than an odd arrangement of type.But there are scholars whom I cannot expect to agree with me; andto conciliate them I have excepted Spenser and Milton from therule.
Glosses of archaic and otherwise difficult words are given atthe foot of the page: but the text has not been disfigured withreference-marks. And rather than make the book unwieldy I haveeschewed notes—reluctantly when some obscure passage or allusionseemed to ask for a timely word; with more equanimity when thetemptation was to criticize or 'appreciate.' For the function ofthe anthologist includes criticizing in silence.
Care has been taken with the texts. But I have sometimes thoughtit consistent with the aim of the book to prefer the morebeautiful to the better attested reading. I have often excisedweak or superfluous stanzas when sure that excision would improve;and have not hesitated to extract a few stanzas from a long poemwhen persuaded that they could stand alone as a lyric. The apologyfor such experiments can only lie in their success: but the riskis one which, in my judgement, the anthologist ought to take. Afew small corrections have been made, but only when they werequite obvious.
The numbers chosen are either lyrical or epigrammatic. Indeed Iam mistaken if a single epigram included fails to preserve atleast some faint thrill of the emotion through which it had topass before the Muse's lips let it fall, with however exquisitedeliberation. But the lyrical spirit is volatile and notoriouslyhard to bind with definitions; and seems to grow wilder with theyears. With the anthologist—as with the