Excerpt from English Poems

This volume is the last in a projected series of four volumes of English poems, intended especially for use with college classes. The first volume will include Old English poems in translation, Middle English poems, a few specimens of the pre-Elizabethan drama, and old ballads. The second volume will cover the Elizabethan and Caroline periods. The third volume will cover the period of the Restoration and the eighteenth century. The present volume is devoted to poetry of the nineteenth century.

The series as a whole is designed for use in survey courses covering the entire field of English literature, and contains about all the poetry needed for reading in such courses. The separate volumes, except the first, will also, it is hoped, be found available for courses in single periods, as furnishing a sufficient basis for study in the classroom. The first volume, although elementary in nature, should increase considerably the value of the series for introductory courses, because, as every experienced teacher knows, the student gets far more well-defined and lasting impressions from actually reading the earlier portions of our literature, even superficially and in translation, than from merely studying a history of the literature or hearing lectures.

In the preparation of the present volume, authors and poems have been chosen both for their merit and for their significance in the history of English literature. The book is therefore not an anthology, or collection of the best poems. It is a collection of good poems that illustrate the different periods and phases of the work of individual poets, and the rise, growth, and decline of schools of poetry.

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