Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB
[blocks in formation]

COPYRIGHT, 1915,

BY EMILIE KIP BAKER.

CHILDREN'S FIRST BK. OF POETRY.

E. P. 16

INTRODUCTION

We hear much nowadays about the decline of poetry. No one reads poetry any more. Poets cannot make a living. The world has ceased to express its ideals in verse. The novel and the short story, rather than the epic or the lyric, furnish our instruction and our inspiration. The magazine and the newspaper are our substitute for a library; and these print verses only to fill out a column or a page. In short, we are living in a reflective, a scientific, a prose age. So we are told.

Like most generalizations about the complex phenomena of modern life, this is only partially true. Every year brings new volumes of dramatic, narrative, and lyric poetry of high merit. Yeats, Synge, and Phillips; Noyes, Masefield, and Gibson; - these and scores of other names come to mind to prove that the gift of song has not fled the earth. Nor are the old poets forgotten. Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Whittier, Longfellow, still sell by the

thousands. We must believe that they are still read. We know that they are quoted, and cited, though less ostentatiously than by our grandsires. We certainly read more prose than former generations, and, possibly, less poetry. But we do still read poetry, and few will doubt that we are somehow the better for it.

Into this heritage of poetry we would admit, not the adults only, but the children. It is in the firm belief that children can enjoy poetry, and can find in it the highest educational value, that this anthology has been compiled. As such an anthology should, it has included those minor classics commonly called "old favorites," other poems of equal or greater merit that are less well known, and many of the newer things that, by their piquancy of beauty or humor, seem entitled to a place in our mental treasure-house. This is the service of an anthology, that it brings together, between the covers of a small book, many precious things that are widely scattered, and might be inaccessible or forgotten. The range of theme and type is large: ballads, pure lyrics, narratives, and elegiacs are all represented. The three hundred or more poems in this series, including nearly all the themes, expressing nearly all the ideals and emotions found in literature, afford an imaginative outlook

on life such as could hardly be found in many volumes: -so compact, so suggestive is poetry.

Perhaps no system of grading poetry for young readers can ever be wholly satisfactory. Many poems cannot be graded, for the simple reason that they appeal to all ages. Who will say whether Sennacherib, the Twenty-Third Psalm, The Lady of Shalott, The Lobsters' Quadrille, and Bed in Summer can give more pleasure at the age of eight or eighteen or twentyeight? Of course there are large dividing lines: the nursery rimes, the verses about childhood and fairies, best suit one age, stories of chivalry another, nature poetry and reflective, or elegiac, poetry yet another. The grading of this series runs along these broad lines.

How should such an anthology be used? One is tempted to answer flippantly: with good taste and good sense. Certainly it is not to be read straight through, with remorseless continuity. One doesn't read poetry so; one takes it in bits, intersperses it between other reading, returns to it again and again, dips in here and there, reads his favorites often, "proves everything," and "holds fast to that which is good" for him. One tries to understand as well as to enjoy; but he doesn't always make the attack with the persistent analysis that

« AnteriorContinuar »