: Bulchevy's Book of English Verse by Quiller Couch Arthur Editor - English poetry

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I have been able to uncover no such "generic equivalent" for an "Oxford" trademark, so until such time as I do, this will be on the order of what we will do.

Be careful, laws are different in different countries, and will be in a constant state of flux as the powers that be try to get a handle on stifling the "Information Age."

May, 1998

Chosen and Edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch

TO THE PRESIDENT FELLOWS AND SCHOLARS OF TRINITY COLLEGE OXFORD A HOUSE OF LEARNING ANCIENT LIBERAL HUMANE AND MY MOST KINDLY NURSE

PREFACE FOR this Anthology I have tried to range over the whole field of English Verse from the beginning, or from the Thirteenth Century to this closing year of the Nineteenth, and to choose the best. Nor have I sought in these Islands only, but wheresoever the Muse has followed the tongue which among living tongues she most delights to honour. To bring home and render so great a spoil compendiously has been my capital difficulty. It is for the reader to judge if I have so managed it as to serve those who already love poetry and to implant that love in some young minds not yet initiated.

Glosses of archaic and otherwise difficult words are given at the foot of the page: but the text has not been disfigured with reference-marks. And rather than make the book unwieldy I have eschewed notes--reluctantly when some obscure passage or allusion seemed to ask for a timely word; with more equanimity when the temptation was to criticize or 'appreciate.' For the function of the anthologist includes criticizing in silence.

Care has been taken with the texts. But I have sometimes thought it consistent with the aim of the book to prefer the more beautiful to the better attested reading. I have often excised weak or superfluous stanzas when sure that excision would improve; and have not hesitated to extract a few stanzas from a long poem when persuaded that they could stand alone as a lyric. The apology for such experiments can only lie in their success: but the risk is one which, in my judgement, the anthologist ought to take. A few small corrections have been made, but only when they were quite obvious.

The numbers chosen are either lyrical or epigrammatic. Indeed I am mistaken if a single epigram included fails to preserve at least some faint thrill of the emotion through which it had to pass before the Muse's lips let it fall, with however exquisite deliberation. But the lyrical spirit is volatile and notoriously hard to bind with definitions; and seems to grow wilder with the years. With the anthologist--as with the fisherman who knows the fish at the end of his sea-line--the gift, if he have it, comes by sense, improved by practice. The definition, if he be clever enough to frame one, comes by after-thought. I don't know that it helps, and am sure that it may easily mislead.

Having set my heart on choosing the best, I resolved not to be dissuaded by common objections against anthologies--that they repeat one another until the proverb loses all application--or perturbed if my judgement should often agree with that of good critics. The best is the best, though a hundred judges have declared it so; nor had it been any feat to search out and insert the second-rate merely because it happened to be recondite. To be sure, a man must come to such a task as mine haunted by his youth and the favourites he loved in days when he had much enthusiasm but little reading.

A deeper import Lurks in the legend told my infant years Than lies upon that truth we live to learn.

Few of my contemporaries can erase--or would wish to erase--the dye their minds took from the late Mr. Palgrave's Golden Treasury: and he who has returned to it again and again with an affection born of companionship on many journeys must remember not only what the Golden Treasury includes, but the moment when this or that poem appealed to him, and even how it lies on the page. To Mr. Bullen's Lyrics from the Elizabethan Song Books and his other treasuries I own a more advised debt. Nor am I free of obligation to anthologies even more recent--to Archbishop Trench's Household Book of Poetry, Mr. Locker-Lampson's Lyra Elegantiarum, Mr. Miles' Poets and Poetry of the Century, Mr. Beeching's Paradise of English Poetry, Mr. Henley's English Lyrics, Mrs. Sharp's Lyra Celtica, Mr. Yeats' Book of Irish Verse, and Mr. Churton Collins' Treasury of Minor British Poetry: though my rule has been to consult these after making my own choice. Yet I can claim that the help derived from them--though gratefully owned--bears but a trifling proportion to the labour, special and desultory, which has gone to the making of my book.

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