Tiffany Vergon, Cam Venezuela and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale
Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters
O! 't is an easy thing
To write and sing;
But to write true, unfeigned verse
Is very hard!
The publishers of the works of the poets from whom illustrativepassages are cited in this volume, have courteously and generouslygiven permission, and I take this opportunity of expressing my thanksto The Macmillan Company, who publish the poems of Thomas Hardy,William Watson, John Masefield, W. W. Gibson, Ralph Hodgson, W. B.Yeats, "A. E.," James Stephens, E. A. Robinson, Vachel Lindsay, AmyLowell, Edgar Lee Masters, Sara Teasdale, J. C. Underwood, FannieStearns Davis; to Henry Holt and Company, who publish the poems ofWalter De La Mare, Edward Thomas, Padraic Colum, Robert Frost, LouisUntermeyer, Sarah N. Cleghorn, Margaret Widdemer, Carl Sandburg, andthe two poems by Henry A. Beers quoted in this book, which appeared inThe Ways of Yale; to Charles Scribner's Sons, publishers of thepoems of George Santayana, Henry Van Dyke, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson,Alan Seeger; to Houghton, Mifflin and Company, publishers of the poemsof Josephine Peabody, Anna Hempstead Branch, and W. A. Bradley'sOld Christmas; to The John Lane Company, publishers of thepoems of Stephen Phillips, Rupert Brooke, Benjamin R. C. Low; to theFrederick A. Stokes Company, publishers of the poems of Alfred Noyes,Robert Nichols, Thomas MacDonagh, Witter Bynner; to the YaleUniversity Press, publishers of the poems of W. A. Percy, BrianHooker, W. E. Benét, C. M. Lewis, E. B. Reed, F. E. Pierce, R. B.Glaenzer, L. W. Dodd; to the Oxford University Press, publishers ofthe poems of Robert Bridges; to Alfred A. Knopf, publisher of thepoems of W. H. Davies; to John W. Luce and Company, publishers of thepoems of John M. Synge; to Harper and Brothers, publishers of WilliamWatson's The Man Who Saw; to Longmans, Green and Company,publishers of the poems of Willoughby Weaving; to Doubleday, Page andCompany, publishers of the poems of James Elroy Flecker; to theBobbs-Merrill Company, publishers of the poems of W. D. Foulke; toThomas B. Mosher, publisher of the poems of W. A. Bradley, W. E.Henley; to James T. White and Company, publishers of WilliamGriffiths; Francis Thompson's In No Strange Land appeared inthe Athenaeum and Lilium Regis in the DublinReview; the poem by Scudder Middleton appeared in ContemporaryVerse, that by Allan Updegraff in the Forum, and that by D.H. Lawrence in Georgian Poetry 1913-15, published by The PoetryBookshop, London.
The titles of the several volumes of poems with dates of publicationare given in my text.
I am grateful to the Yale University Librarians for help onbibliographical matters, and to Professor Charles Bennett and ByrneHackett, Esquire, for giving some facts about the Irish poets.
The material in this volume originally appeared in The Bookman,1917-1918. It is now published with much addition and revision.
The