Excerpt from The Collected Poems of T. E. Brown

You are told that to many he was only a local poet, a party who rhymed in dialect - a kind of beggar at Apollo"s gate; and you are told by academic persons - things made after supper at the Muses" table out of a melon rind - that he was one affected and unskilled in letters. You are told, too, that to a friend who feigned to condole with him for that his name was not found in a certain list of minor poets, "Perhaps," he said - "perhaps I am among the majors." A major poet? "Tis a magnificent assumption, a Great Perhaps indeed; yet to read this Complete Edition of his verse is to be with him in it heart and soul. I knew it all before; and I have taken it all again; and I will avow my conviction that when I wrote of it as "the fullest expression of life" we of these late years have been privileged to consider and enjoy, I stated a case so baldly and so niggardly that my statement clamours for enhancement. The Letters have shown what manner of man Brown was - how personal, how many-sided; how humorous and how passionate; how rich in sentiment, yet how abounding in farce; how brilliantly and variously lettered, and how in-alterably humane; how strong in discipline, how quick with the defensive spirit, yet how riotously accidental, how beautifully unpedantic. Well, to state that that particular Brown unpacked his heart in words, and here they are - to state this, I say, should be enough for all them that have the sense of character and the right delight in letters.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Collected Poems of T. E. Brown (Classic Reprint) (W. E. Henley)