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INTRODUCTION
Any collection of English and American poetry must strive, within the confines oL one small volume, to be representative merely. Where the field of choice is so large what is chosen must depend finally on personal preference. And no two persons will agree exactly as to what is thoroughly representative.
It is my hope that of the works of some seventy-five distinguished writers represented here, nothing that has been included is either hackneyed, or trivial. Many poems, especially longer works, have had to be omitted for lack of space; others, old favorites too well known, have been kept out in order to allow room for poems not so familiar but which are yet full of interest, subtlety, beauty, or wisdom. In one or two cases poems of contemporary writers are missing because of limitation of copyright and inability to receive permission from their original publishers to reprint here. What has been included is representative of a very great and a very wonderful heritage.
Shelley called poetry "the record of the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest minds."
Wordsworth said that poetry was the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity, adding elsewhere that it was "the breath and finer spirit ^ of all knowledge; the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." Keats believed:
"------the great end
Of poesy, that it should be a friend To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of men."
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