Studies in Poetry and Criticism Author:John Churton Collins Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE COLLECTED POEMS OF MR. WILLIAM WATSON.1 THE appearance of an edition of the collected poems of Mr. William Watson, carefully revised, with important alter... more »ations and additions, and comprising many new pieces, will be hailed joyfully wherever poetry is appreciated. Mr. Watson's reluctance to sanction any complete edition of his works has long been regretted by his many admirers, who have hitherto had to content themselves partly with the numerous booklets, often most difficult to procure, in which the poems originally appeared, and partly with the very imperfect collection published in 1899. These are now superseded by the present two volumes, which are not only within the reach of everybody, but which contain all that a most discriminating editor thinks best representative in the former miscellanies of Mr. Watson's work, Mr. Watson himself assisting by a final revision of each poem selected. It would not perhaps be too much to say that Mr. Watson's reputation has hitherto been, like that of Matthew Arnold in his earlier days, somewhat 1 The Poems of William Watson. In two volumes. (John Lane, The Bodley Head. London and New York.) esoteric, and there can be little doubt that the reason for this has been his refusal to consent to what happily he has at last been induced to sanction. The publication of these volumes, by giving the general public easy access to writings which could only be known to them fragmentarily, and which they were not likely to go out of their way to seek, cannot fail to enlarge Mr. Watson's sphere of influence and fame; and I heartily trust—for no influence could be more salutary, no fame more worthy to be universal—that this will be the case. To many thousands of his contemporaries he is probably, at present, best known by poems most of which ...« less