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Search - ENGLISH LYRICS CHAUCER TO POE 1340 - 1809

ENGLISH LYRICS CHAUCER TO POE 1340 1809
Author: WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY

ENGLISH LYRICS CHAUCER TO POE SELECTED AND ARRANGED BY WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY A Book of Vcrses undemath the Bough, A lug OJ Wine, a Loaf of Byead, and Thm Beside me singing in the WildLrncss-0, Wilderness zucre Paradise cnow. Omdr Khdyydm. LONDON METHUEN AND CO. ESSEX STREET, STRAND 1897 Edinburgh T. and A. CONSTABL P r , i nters to Her Majesty T... more »O GEORGE WYNDHAM IN GRATITUDE FOR MUCH GOOD TALK GOOD COUNSEL AND GOOD FEELING -PREFACE - BEGINNIN w G i th Chaucer, this book should have ended with Tennyson. As it could not end with Tennyson, it begins with the Beginner of English Poetry, and ends, by a piece of chronological good luck, with the one American I know who, thus far, can claim fellowship with the greater English Poets. Its object is to present a fairly representative collection of such among the purely lyrical treasures of our tongue as were amassed between Chaucer and Poe. Whether or not it achieves that object is not, of course, for me to say. But I may be pardoned for pointing out that it has two features which I believe to be novel. Acting on the principle that verse in English is, so facto, English verse, and realising that the English Lyric has lived in Scotland when it was moribund, or worse, in England, I have included, with the work of the aforesaid American, examples of certain old-world Scots, nameless and other not much read, I fear, in the land which gave them birth, but, as seems to me, worth reading anywhere. Again, the Authorised Version is a monument of English Prose. But the inspiration and the effect of many parts of it are absolutely lyrical and on those parts I have drawn for such a series of achievements in lyrism as will be found, I trust, neither the least interesting nor the least persuasive group in an anthology which pretends to set forth none but the choicest among English lyrics. It is easy to tell a lyric when you see one. It is not so easy to say what a lyric is. Lyrical, says Mr. Palgrave in his Preface to the best-read anthology in the language, has been-presumably, therefore, should be- held to imply that each Poem shall turn on some single thought, feeling, or situation. I would rather say that unless thought, and feeling, and situation all are single, and are all present, and so present that in the final result feeling viii PREFACE shall oblige us to forget the others, or at least to consider them as chiefly essential to its triumphing expression, that result isnot a lyric. In Ruth, for instance, the situation may be described perhaps as single but the thought is so full or change, the feeling so placid and so impersonal, that to make Ruth a lyric is to make lyrics of most of the stories in lyrical forms we have. Again, both thought and situation are single in Grays Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College but, though the intention of the thing is lyrical, it finds no place in this anthology, for the reason that, to me at least, it lacks that quality without which no piece of verse, whatever its appearance on the printed page, can ever be held a lyric. I mean the quality of emotion or, as Mr. Palgrave calls it, feeling. It is the absence of this quality, or its presence in the smallest doses, and these extremely disguised, which makes the lyrical output of the years between Rochester and Blake so scant in quantity and so poor in kind. And this, as I believe, is rather due to a radical vice in the authors of that output than to the tyranny of any literary fashions in deference to which they may have worked...

ISBN-13: 9781408630761
ISBN-10: 1408630761
Publication Date: 10/26/2007
Pages: 468
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Giniger Press
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
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