Excerpt from The Golden Treasury of Longer Poems: Selected Edited
This volume of longer poems is the natural successor to the two anthopologies of songs and lyrics and the ballad book in the same library. It does not apply too rigidly its measure of length, being intended to take up the line of English verse at the point where the others paused, to maintain the record and make it of a piece with the rest. There are poems that are still lyrical, like Drayton"s "Agincourt," and others, like Chaucer"s "Knightes Tale," which show the sustained narrative power of English verse. Again there are poems, like Parnell"s "Hermit," which knit up afresh the old ballad tradition of "Chevy Chase" and "Clerk Saunders." There are noble elegies. too; and tributes of poet to poet - "Adonais" and Ben Jonson"s lines to the Beloved Memory of Shakespeare, while the English love of place and of Nature is heard again and again in its pages. In all this variety, the main purpose is to show the great succession of the English poets who wrote, as Coleridge says, with
A light in sound, a soundlike power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere.
It keeps on the whole close to the recognised track. It does not forget the great prose writers, like Swift and Dr. Johnson, who influenced verse. But chiefly it upholds the princely line, in which Chaucer, Spenser, Marvell, Milton, Ben Jonson, Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, Pope, Goldsmith, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats are the masters and the great maintainers. In the shadow of their greater fame stand other poets worthy of remembrance, on whom as it were the true tradition took hold - men who were not great poets but who yet contributed to the rich store. Such were Joseph Warton, whose "Grave of King Arthur" is rescued from comparative forgetfulness, and Shenstone, whose "Schoolmistress" is the reminder of an old and pleasant mode of rural art.
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