THE present anthology is a companion book to the old Golden Treasury, ranging farther back in time and farther forward, and adding many poets who have enriched the lyric tongue, omitted in those pages. Here the delicious early songs, in particular, written before or during Chaucer's time, that give the true April note to our poetry, have been brought into the first group; while into the last come many of the poets who were still writing when Palgrave and Tennyson talked over the final limits of their selection. Two periods are thus added to the record, and the volume falls naturally into a division of six books-the First leading up to and away from Chaucer, ranges on to Tudor times; the Second leads from Wyatt and Surrey to Shakespeare; the Third, from Ben Jonson to the last of the Lutanists, including Campion and Herrick; the Fourth gives the eighteenth-century men, but pauses at the advent of William Blake; the Fifth adds the poets from Blake to Shelley and Keats, who broke with the town poetry and brought the revolution; and the Sixth brings down the lyric line to those writers of yesterday who, if fate had been kinder, might have still been writing-John Davidson, Lionel Johnson and Francis Thompson among them. In this long succession we find the art passing through many hard seasons, and coming out of each with new vigour. The foreign invasions might seem at a first glance to threaten the English idiom; yet the cuckoo song was an old French strain, and Chaucer took music from Italy before Wyatt went there for his new instrument, and Shakespeare's ear was affected by echoes of the Provençal love-poets. The straitening of the eighteenth century verse was followed by the lyric and romantic deliverance to be seen in Burns and Chatterton, Coleridge and Wordsworth. If the poets, of all writers, are those who make light of chronology, we can, as we do with the thrushes, mark when their note passes its spring innocence and grows ripe with summer, without losing our zest for their music. As the songs by the unknown first poets seem to run on inevitably to Chaucer, who after them gives us an idea of what larger developments of poetry might come about, so the beauty and force, the mixed naturalness and art, of the vii Elizabethan lyric do not lose anything by the discovery that there was a spring before their summer. In these pages Palgrave's own principle of selection has been followed; but for the sake of convenience and in order to individualise the poets, the work of each writer has been given in sequence, and where no name follows a poem, it means that the writer is anonymous. In general the order of the book is chronological, but it is varied here and there, in order to allow for the fact that the poets have not always consented to fit themselves into periods, and that half a century may sometimes divide a lyric writer from his nearest relation and fondest disciple. Another consideration bound to weigh with the anthologist lies in the discovery that every anthology has a law of its own. It needs for its total effect and the finer correspondence of its parts, a variety in its excellence, and no single note, however taking to the ear, must be repeated too often. There are poems which, while not perfect as works of art, yet become of value in such a collection because they add an indispensable something, a word, a phrase, a memorable epithet, to the lyric dialect. The boundaries are more open here than in the old Golden Treasury, while the maintenance of the singing note in the verse has perhaps been kept more clear. As we turn the pages of the old music and song books, or the poets like Campion and Herrick who wrote with the cadence of the luten their ears, we become aware that a lyric, like a flower or like a crystal, has a symmetry and a unity of its own. But it never hardens absolutely into a type. It keeps adding something new and strange of its own, with every relay, to the given melody, breaking from the type with every heaven-sent impulse of the poet; and all these accessions need to be shown in the lyric anthology. One thing there is by which this book has inevitably to suffer, -the omission of many connective links in the poems which have already been printed in Palgrave. But the reader, by taking the two books together, and taking up the thread in the one where it is dropped in the other, will easily complete the account for himself. Yet another limitation is that of space; for every song or lyric that has gone into these pages, a couple of others with like claims, has had to be left out. In fact, only a reader who has worked over the ground on the same quest can estimate what the lyric wealth of our poetry actually is, or how many exquisite songs and poems, which to-day we are in danger of forgetting, still await their resurrection. Special mention should be made of those who have given formal consent for the reprinting of copyright poems. The thanks of compiler and reader, public and publisher, are due to Mrs. John Davidson and Mr. Grant Richards for a poem of John Davidson's; Mr. John Lane, for poems by W. B. Rands and Ernest Dowson; Mr. Elkin Mathews, for two poems by Lionel Johnson; Messrs. Chatto & Windus, for two poems by R. L. Stevenson, and a sonnet by Mathilde Blind; Messrs. Longmans & Co., for two sonnets by Andrew Lang; and Mr. Wm. Meredith and Messrs. Constable for two poems of George Meredith. Further acknowledgement is due to those who have generously put poems at the editor's free disposal; Mr. Watts-Dunton for three poems of Swinburne; Mr. Wilfrid Meynell for three poems of Francis Thompson; Dr. Greville MacDonald for two poems of George MacDonald; Mr. Bertram Dobell for a poem by James Thomson; Mr. Walter Scott for a lyric by Joseph Skipsey; and Mrs. William Sharp and Mr. William Heinemann for two poems by "Fiona Macleod" and Wm. Sharp. E. R. BIBLIOGRAPHY IN BRIEF OF ENGLISH LYRIC ANTHOLOGIES Ane Compendious Buik of Godlie Psalmes and Spirituall Sangis (1545 ?) Arber, Ed. The English Garner, 1877. Beeching, H. C. Paradise of English Poetry, 1893. Bright, J. W., and Kittredge, G. L. The Albion Series of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English Poetry, 1900. Bryant, W. C. Campbell, T. New Library of Poetry and Song, 1876. Chambers, E. K. English Pastorals, 1895. Chambers, E. K., and Sidgwick, F. Early English Lyrics, 1907. Collier, J. Payne. Lyrical Poems, 1844. Cox, F. A. English Madrigals, 1899. Davison, Francis. A Poetical Rapsody, 1602. Dircks, W. H. Cavalier and Courtier Lyrists, 1891. Douglas, Sir George. Book of Scottish Poetry, 1911. Hazlitt, W. C. Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England. 4 vols. 1864-66. Henley, W. E. English Lyrics, Chaucer to Poe, 1340-1809, 1897. Locker-Lampson, F. Lyra Elegantiarum, 1867; enlarged 1891. MacDonald, G. England's Antiphon, 1868. Meynell, Alice. A Seventeenth Century Anthology, 1903. Morley, Henry. Companion Poets, 1891-92. Morris, R. Specimens of Early English (Poetry), 1866. (Part I revised by W. W. Skeat, 1882; 2nd edition revised 1885.) Munday, A. Banquet of Dainty Conceits, 1581. Palgrave, F. T. Golden Treasury, 1861. Revised and enlarged 1896. Second Series, 1897. Treasury of Sacred Song, 1889. Park, T. Heliconia, 1815. Percy, T. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765. Quiller-Couch, Sir A. T. Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900, 1900. Ramsay, Allan. Tea Table Miscellany, 1724-7. Poetry, 1791. Collection of English Songs, 1813. Sharp, Eliz. A. Lyra Celtica, 1896. Sharp, Wm. A Century of Sonnets, 1887. Songs of Scotland (ed. by R. Chambers), 1862. British Poets, 1831. Stedman, E. C. A Victorian Anthology, 1837-95, 1896. The Phoenix Nest, 1593. Tottel's Miscellany, 1557. Oxford Book of Ancient Popular Ward, T. H. The English Poets, selections, 4 vol., 1883. White, Gleeson. Ballades and Rondeaux, 1893. Works of the English Poets, ed. by A. Chalmers, 21 vol. 1810. Works of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, ed, by Dr. Samuel Johnson, 8 vol., 1800. Wright, Thos. Songs and Carols, 1836. Specimens of Lyric Poetry, ed. from Harleian MS. in British Museum, 1842. Songs and Ballads, 1860. |