Anthology

“ This anthology includes hymns as well as secular poems. The collection is good in itself, as I have already said, and, moreover, to all real lovers of anthologies it will also seem good because each of them will take much satisfaction in wondering why certain of his or her favorite poems have been left out and why certain other poems have been put in. I suppose every man who cares for poetry at all at times wishes that he could compile an anthology for his own purposes. ”

“ CELTIC ANTHOLOGY AND POETIC REMAINS.
There is no people, the annals of which may not be separated into three distinct periods, namely: the period of heroes and epico-poetic narration; the period of myth, fable, and apotheosis; and the period of realistic and definitive history. Or, to range the whole in the order of historical sequence, the three distinctive phases of race-annals may be formulated as follows:
1. The period of myth and apotheosis—which, among the European races especially, constitutes the beginning of history. ”

“ The further his researches extend, the greater will be his astonishment at the extent to which the Anthology has been laid under contribution for thoughts which have become household words in all cultivated languages, and at the beneficial effect of the imitation of its brevity, simplicity, and absolute verbal accuracy upon the undisciplined luxuriance of modern genius. ”

“ The editors of this anthology wish to present in convenient form representative work of the poets who are to-day creating what is commonly called “the new poetry,”—a phrase no doubt rash and most imperfectly descriptive, since the new in art is always the elder old, but one difficult to replace with any form of words more exact. ”

“ I would beg any possible, but improbable, reader who desires to peruse the Anthology as a whole, to read first the epigrams of Meleager's Stephanus, then those of that of PhiHppus, and finally the Byzantine poems. In the intervals the iron hand of History had entirely recast and changed the spirit and the language of Greece, and much misunderstanding has been caused by people quoting anything from the "Greek Anthology" as specifically "Greek." We have to deal with three ages almost as widely separated as the Roman conquest, the Saxon conquest, and the Norman conquest of England. ”

“ Indeed, many critics feel that poetry is coming nearer than either the novel or the drama to the actual life of to-day. The magazine Poetry, ever since its foundation in October, 1912, has encouraged this new spirit in the art, and the anthology is a further effort on the part of its editors to present the new spirit to the public. ”

“ It is this direct relation which the more progressive modern poets are trying to restore. In this effort they discard not only archaic diction but also the shop-worn subjects of past history or legend, which have been through the centuries a treasure-trove for the second-rate.
This effort at modern speech, simplicity of form, and authentic vitality of theme, is leading our poets to question the authority of the accepted laws of English verse, and to study other languages, ancient and modern, in the effort to find out what poetry really is. ”

“ Use of the present Anthology in the Spanish classes at Harvard University has shown that Spanish verse appeals to the imagination of the English-speaking student. On that account, the editor now ventures to offer this book for general academic use. The volume should not be without a certain popular value also, since many poems are included in it that through translations have been introduced into English literature, and, like Longfellow’s version of the Coplas of Manrique, have there made their fortune. ”

“ All these influences, which tend to make the art of poetry, especially poetry in English, less provincial, more cosmopolitan, are by no means a defiance of the classic tradition. On the contrary, they are an endeavor to return to it at its great original sources, and to sweep away artificial laws—the obiter dicta of secondary minds—which have encumbered it. There is more of the great authentic classic tradition, for example, in the Spoon River Anthology than in the Idylls of the King, Balaustian’s Adventure, and Sohrab and Rustum combined. ”

“ To this we may add, that words are the transcript of those ideas which are in the mind of man, and that writing or printing is the transcript of words. As the Supreme Being has expressed, and as it were printed, his ideas in the creation, men express their ideas in books, which, by this great invention of these latter ages, may last as long as the sun and moon, and perish only in the general wreck of nature. ”

“ Let an author combine these others with a series of events, let him put them in as aids to the understanding or as ornaments on the thread of his recital, and they are accepted without question as elements of narration, be it prose or verse in form, true or fictitious in content. That is to say, though a story often contains to some extent all the other forms of writing too, we think of it as narrative because it carries us along a course of events. ”

“ Literature and drama in ethology. Poetry, drama, and literary fiction are useful to ethology in one or the other of two ways: (1) they reveal facts of the mores; (2) they show the longings and ideals of the group,—in short, what the people like and wish for. The second division includes mythology, fairy tales, and extravaganzas. The taste for them, if it exists, is a feature of the mores, but in fact such a taste is hardly ever popular. It is a product of culture. Myths, legends, proverbs, fables, riddles, etc., are popular products. ”

“ The province of the epic is the poetical narrative of real or supposed events, and the representation of real, or at least natural, characters; and history, in its noblest examples, is an account of occurrences in which great events are commemorated, and distinguished men appear as agents and actors. Epic poetry and the drama are but narratives, the former partly and the latter wholly, in the form of a dialogue, but their characters and personages are usually, in part at least, the creations of the imagination. ”

“ A crowd of fantastic imaginings or additions, to supply the main substance, and a certain common-sense grasp of actual conditions and circumstances to set them upon, and contrast them with—these are the great requirements of Fiction in life and character. You must mix prose and poetry to get a good romance or even novel. The consciences of the ancients revolted from this mixture of kinds; but there was no such revolt in the earlier moderns, and least of all in our own mediæval forefathers. ”

“ Whenever he touches a historical or literary theme his whole being seems to undergo a transformation. The real nature flashes out through his twinkling eyes. While he muses the fire burns, and, like the Psalmist, he speaks with his tongue. Dates and details, facts and traditions, cantos and poetry, reams of prose, English and Latin and Greek and French, come tumbling out in headlong but not disorderly array. ”

“ The purpose of the present study, then, has been to arrange in a single logical classification the elements which make up traditional narrative literature. Stories that have formed part of a tradition, whether oral or literary, find a place here. The folktale, the myth, the ballad, the fable, the mediaeval romance, the fabliau, the jest, the exemplum, and the local tradition have all been included, though some of these divisions have been inadequately recorded. ”

“ This preparation for telling here described will result in a fundamental imitation of the author of the story. By participating in the life of the story; by realizing it as folklore; by realizing it as literature—its emotion, its imagination, its basis of truth, its message, its form; by paying conscious attention to the large units of the structure, the exact sequence of the plot, the characters, and the setting, the particular details of description, and the unique word—the story-teller reproduces the author's mode of thinking. She does with her mind what she wishes the child to do with his. ”

“ In all countries the metrical tale is many generations older than the prose story; for prose writing is a refinement of the literary art which flourishes only when reading has become popular; while verse, being at first a kind of memoria technica used for the correct transmission of sacred texts and the heroic tradition, strikes the ear and fixes the recollection of an audience. The exploits of mighty warriors and the miracles of saints—love, fighting, and theology—form the subject matter of these stories in verse. ”

“ Chrysanthema gathered from the Greek Anthology. By W. M. Hardinge. The Nineteenth Century, November, pp. 869-888. 1881. Amaranth and Asphodel. Songs from the Greek Anthology. By Alfred Joshua Butler. [The translator is to be distinguished from the late Arthur J. Butler.] 1883. Love in Idleness: a volume of Poems. [By H. C. Beeching (by whom the majority of versions from the Anthology are contributed) , J. B. B. Nicholls, and J. W. Mackail. The book was reprinted in part as Love's Looking Glass, in 1891, and Dean Beeching's versions are reprinted, revised, in his In a Garden, 1895.] ”

“ Each volume should coincide with a phase of the poem; you will observe that there are three phases to our little treatise, which correspond with those of human life—three phases through which the soul of man must pass in its terrestrial journeyings. On the first page, only the name of the poem must be set forth; the name of the poet must not appear. And further, good friend, I urge you to observe the profoundest secrecy as to the authorship of this treatise upon human life. The identity of the author must never be disclosed.”
“Why must the identity of the author never be disclosed, old boy?” ”

“ Thus do the spirits of the remote past sit at our firesides still, and kindle the imagination of our little folks: and in the rich tapestry of story and picture which 239 each age weaves around it, elements from many different sources are continually and almost inextricably interwoven, as if the warp of human wonder and imagination was crossed with many coloured threads of mythological lore, history and allegory, symbolism and romance. ”

“ Other types of early literature are the riming chronicles or verse histories (such as Layamon's Brut, a famous poem, in which the Arthurian legends appear as part of English history) , stories of travel, translations, religious poems, books of devotion, miracle plays, fables, satires, ballads, hymns, lullabies, lyrics of love and nature,—an astonishing collection for so ancient a time, indicative at once of our changing standards of poetry and of our unchanging human nature. ”

“ Though the instinct for a good story, on which the interest in fiction is based, is of immemorial antiquity, and may well be as old as human speech, the novel, as we understand it, is comparatively modern. ”

“ What are we to say of the many tales and fables which are to be found in neither of those famous collections, and not tales alone, but traits and features of old tradition, broken bits of fable, roots and germs of mighty growths of song and story, nay, even the very words, which exist in Western popular literature, and which modern philology has found obstinately sticking in Sanscrit, and of which fresh proofs and instances are discovered every day? ”

“ On the form side, this work is prose and it is art—the first English prose fiction, so announced and so taken. It is literary legend. An artist conscious of his art offered the material not as history or religion, but as a thing of beauty. ”

“ To these men the rediscovery of ancient literature came like a revelation, disclosing to their wondering eyes a splendid vision of the antique world, such as the cloistered student of the Middle Ages never dreamed of under the gloomy shadow of the minster and within the sound of its solemn bells. ”

“ What is obvious in that ancient literature is the belief in a complete circle of correspondences between every root sound in the human voice and elements, forms and colours, and that the alphabet was sacred in character. Intuitions which modern psychologists regard as evidence of decadence are found present in the literature of antiquity. ”

“ Ancient literature was now welcomed, not only as supplying standards of form, but as disclosing a new conception of life; a conception freer, larger, more rational, and more joyous, than the medieval; one which gave unfettered scope to the play of the human feelings, to the sense of beauty, and to all the activities of the intellect. ”

“ It is exposed to the attractions of all kinds of subordinate and partial literature,—the fairy story, the conventional romance, the pathetic legend,—and it escapes them all by taking them all up as moments, as episodes and points of view, governed by the conception, or the comprehension, of some of the possibilities of human character in a certain form of society. ”

“ Where the author, in this species of writing, has employed history, usually, as a mere loop, upon which to hang his lively fancies and audacious inventions, embodying in his narrative as small a portion of the chronicle as possible, I have been content to reverse the process, making the fiction simply tributary, and always subordinate to the fact. ”

“ Here the primitive has vanished, we treat certain poetical motives, motives which the teller hardly belives in, but which, after traditional custom must be used in this kind of a tale, for the tales are after all poetical compositions too, and in their lives, in a rich popular tradition, we have so to say an equivalent to the written sources with which the history of litterature deals even if the material as a link in a verbal tradition conforms to other laws than those reigning in the world of litterature. ”

“ Possibly a denominational religious weekly and another journal of fashion or business. Then come the thousands who read the best magazines, and whatever else is for the moment popular in novels and poetry—the last dialect story, the fashionable poem, the questionable but talked-of novel. Let a violent attack be made on the decency of a new story and instantly, if only it is clever, its author becomes famous. ”