An anthology of Catholic poetry with works by Maurice Baring, Thomas Merton, Hilaire Belloc, Aubrey Beardsley, G. K. Chesterton, Padraic Colum, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Walsh, Alice Meynell, Joyce Kilmer, Michael Williams and others - over 128 poets with over 300 poems. "This is not a collection of devotional poems. What I have tried to do is bring together the poems in English that I like best that were written by Catholics since the middle of the Nineteenth Century. There are in this book poems religious in theme, there are also love-songs and war-songs. But I think that it may be called a book of Catholic poems. For a Catholic is not a Catholic only when he prays, he is a Catholic in all the thoughts and actions of his life. And when a Catholic attempts to reflect in his words some of the Beauty of which as a poet he is conscious, he cannot be far from prayer and adoration." Alfred Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918), he never used the first name, was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1886. He was educated at Rutgers College and Columbia University, and had a brief career as a teacher before moving into journalism. He worked on the staff of The Standard Dictionary from 1909 to 1912, and then became a special writer on the New York Times Sunday Magazine.