Project Gutenberg Book of English Verse | Page 3

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Project Gutenberg Etext/Project Gutenberg Book of English Verse or

The Project Gutenberg Etext of Bulchevy's Book of English Verse
Previously released as:
The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Oxford
Book of English Verse
Chosen and Edited by
Arthur Quiller-Couch
TO
THE PRESIDENT
FELLOWS AND SCHOLARS
OF

TRINITY COLLEGE OXFORD
A HOUSE OF LEARNING

ANCIENT LIBERAL HUMANE
AND MY MOST KINDLY

NURSE
PREFACE
FOR this Anthology I have tried to range over the whole field of
English Verse from the beginning, or from the Thirteenth Century to
this closing year of the Nineteenth, and to choose the best. Nor have I
sought in these Islands only, but wheresoever the Muse has followed
the tongue which among living tongues she most delights to honour. To
bring home and render so great a spoil compendiously has been my
capital difficulty. It is for the reader to judge if I have so managed it as
to serve those who already love poetry and to implant that love in some
young minds not yet initiated.
My scheme is simple. I have arranged the poets as nearly as possible in
order of birth, with such groupings of anonymous pieces as seemed
convenient. For convenience, too, as well as to avoid a dispute-royal, I
have gathered the most of the Ballads into the middle of the
Seventeenth Century; where they fill a languid interval between two
winds of inspiration--the Italian dying down with Milton and the
French following at the heels of the restored Royalists. For
convenience, again, I have set myself certain rules of spelling. In the
very earliest poems inflection and spelling are structural, and to
modernize is to destroy. But as old inflections fade into modern the old
spelling becomes less and less vital, and has been brought (not, I hope,
too abruptly) into line with that sanctioned by use and familiar. To do
this seemed wiser than to discourage many readers for the sake of
diverting others by a scent of antiquity which--to be essential-- should
breathe of something rarer than an odd arrangement of type. But there
are scholars whom I cannot expect to agree with me; and to conciliate
them I have excepted Spenser and Milton from the rule.
Glosses of archaic and otherwise difficult words are given at the foot of
the page: but the text has not been disfigured with reference-marks.
And rather than make the book unwieldy I have eschewed
notes--reluctantly when some obscure passage or allusion seemed to
ask for a timely word; with more equanimity when the temptation was
to criticize or 'appreciate.' For the function of the anthologist includes

criticizing in silence.
Care has been taken with the texts. But I have sometimes thought it
consistent with the aim of the book to prefer the more
beautiful to the
better attested reading. I have often excised weak or superfluous
stanzas when sure that excision would improve; and have not hesitated
to extract a few stanzas from a long poem when persuaded that they
could stand alone as a lyric. The apology for such experiments can only
lie in their success: but the risk is one which, in my judgement, the
anthologist ought to take. A few small corrections have been made, but
only when they were quite obvious.
The