First Series
I. Poems and Ballads (First Series).
II. Songs before Sunrise, and Songs of Two Nations.
III. Poems and Ballads (Second and Third Series), and Songs of the Spring-Tides.
IV. Tristram of Lyonesse, The Tale of Balen, Atalanta in Calydon, Erechtheus.
V. Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, etc.
VI. A Midsummer Holiday, Astrophel, A Channel Passage and Other Poems.
(FIRST SERIES)
First printed (Chatto), 1904
Reprinted 1904, '09, '10, '12
(Heinemann), 1917
To my best and dearest friend I dedicate the first collected edition ofmy poems, and to him I address what I have to say on the occasion.
You will agree with me that it is impossible for any man to undertakethe task of commentary, however brief and succinct, on anything he hasdone or tried to do, without incurring the charge of egoism. But thereare two kinds of egoism, the furtive and the frank: and the outspokenand open-hearted candour of Milton and Wordsworth, Corneille and Hugo,is not the least or the lightest of their claims to the regard as wellas the respect or the reverence of their readers. Even if I were worthyto claim kinship with the lowest or with the highest of these deathlessnames, I would not seek to shelter myself under the shadow of itsauthority. The question would still remain open on all sides. Whether itis worth while for any man to offer any remarks or for any other man toread his remarks on his own work, his own ambition, or his own attempts,he cannot of course determine. If there are great examples of abstinencefrom such a doubtful enterprise, there are likewise great examples tothe contrary. As long as the writer can succeed in evading the kindredcharges and the cognate risks of vanity and humility, there can be noreason why he should not undertake it. And when he has nothing to regretand nothing to recant, when he finds nothing that he could wish tocancel, to alter, or to unsay, in any page he has ever laid before hisreader, he need not be seriously troubled by the inevitableconsciousness that the work of his early youth is not and cannot beunnaturally unlike the work of a very young man. This would be no excusefor it, if it were in any sense bad work: if it be so, no apology wouldavail; and I certainly have none to offer.
It is now thirty-six years since my first volume of miscellaneous verse,lyrical and dramatic and elegiac and generally heterogeneous, had asquaint a reception and as singular a fortune as I have ever heard orread of. I do not think you will differ from my opinion that what isbest in it cannot be divided from what is not so good by any other lineof division than that which marks off mature f