The Golden Treasury

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION LYRIC POETRY The Golden Treasury has for half a century been the accepted collection of the best English verse, for the period it covers, from the age of Elizabeth to about 1830. The selections were made by a poet, Francis Turner Palgrave, with the advice of one of the greatest modern poets,...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION LYRIC POETRY The Golden Treasury has for half a century been the accepted collection of the best English verse, for the period it covers, from the age of Elizabeth to about 1830. The selections were made by a poet, Francis Turner Palgrave, with the advice of one of the greatest modern poets, Alfred Tennyson.1 What lyric poetry is, and what it means to a man of poetic appreciation, can best be seen by reading Palgrave's own Preface (p. 29). As we turn over the leaves of the book, we see that the subjects of poetry are as varied as life itself; we find poems on war and patriotism, on birth and death, on flowers, trees, and streams, on the sea and the sky; poems on friendship and on love in all degrees, ? youthful romance, lovers parted or forsaken, love in marriage and in old age; poems of compliment, of humor, of regret, of aspiration. It is not the subject that makes the poem, but what the poet sees in it, beyond the vision of the rest of us. Shakespeare's banished duke found Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything; and Wordsworth said To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. This power of seeing beyond the superficial fact to some more important and significant truth is what we mean by the poetic imagination. By this power of imagination the poet summons up whatever comparisons will throw the essential quality of ' See introduction by Edward Huttou to the Booklovers' Library edition of The Golden Treasury. the fact out into the light. The song of an unseen skylark, for instance, reminds Shelley (p. 393) of all manner of pure and bright loveliness from a hidden source, ? moonlight from behind a cloud, hymns of an unknown poet, love songs...