INTRODUCTION

"Art," George Gissing tells us in one of the most delightful books of the last half century, "Art is an expression, satisfying and abiding, of the zest of life." This remark is not a definition, for it ignores many aspects and uses of art, but it directs our attention to one important phase of the subject which is commonly overlooked. People talk of "appreciating" a symphony, a painting, or a poem, as of a dreary but necessary proceeding, like learning the multiplication table or the principal parts of verbs. All too often art is represented as the stern daughter of the voice of culture, a misconception which teachers and writers sometimes unintentionally strengthen. Ruskin, for example, leaves upon the reader the impression that pictures are a kind of examination; if you do not care for them, you fail the test and, culturally, are lost.

It is well, therefore, to bear in mind Gissing's remark, "Art is an expression . . . of the zest of life." It is well for us who teach and for us who are taught to remember that poems were not written to be studied, that not a single selection in this book was composed for the classroom, that nothing, indeed, was farther from an author's mind than lessons and school. Poets are gifted with more sensitive perceptions than most of us as well as much greater powers of expressing what they see and feel. They experience moments of ecstasy, of doubt, of despair, or of high resolution; they feel intensely the beauty, the wonder, the mystery of life, or have flashes of insight into its meaning. All this

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they pass on to us, the laughter, the hope, the love, the suffering, the vivid consciousness of the world about them. Sometimes, like the birds, they merely sing; often they do no more than express a mood, but always their purpose is to make us see what they have seen, feel what they have felt, grasp what they have learned. If we do not do this, the selection is, for us at least, a failure. However much we know about a poem, its meter, its allusions, the meaning of its lines, the life of its author, we do not know it unless it has done for us what it was intended to do. An umbrella is made to keep off rain, and no study of its materials and its construction is of any account if we leave it behind when we go out into a storm. The right reading of a poem is the vivid entering into the experience, intellectual as well as emotional, that it expresses. The only study which has value is that which helps us to enter into this experience, which enables the poem to do for us what its author intended it to do.

And the right kind of study can be of invaluable assistance in this direction. For, though some great poems yield a large part of their beauty and meaning on a first reading, many, perhaps most, do not. The author's purpose and the sense of some of his lines may not be immediately clear to us; his methods may seem strange and repellent; he may speak of persons, places, and customs of which we know nothing, or of problems we have never faced. If he deals with sin, death, immortality, and the like, his work will probably be none too easy reading. To be sure, we do not need to understand everything in a poem in order to enjoy it and profit by it. Few of the admirers of "Kubla Khan pretend to know what it is about, and many who are thrilled by the flawless beauty of "Lycidas" have but the vaguest

notions as to the "fable of Bellerus old," Namancos, or "that two-handed engine at the door." Very likely our schools have stressed references and allusions too much and the meaning of the lines and the purpose of the poem too little; very likely teachers have erected a scaffolding and then have forgotten to build the house; yet the danger with most of us is that we shall know too little, not too much. We may so devote ourselves to individual trees that we forget to look at the woods, but no man's enjoyment of the woods is dulled by a thorough knowledge of forestry. Indeed, most intellectual persons learn in time that the best way to like a thing is to study it, and that dislike of persons or of things usually means that we have not taken the trouble to understand them. Yet poems and other works of art, it must be remembered, are not really understood until they are enjoyed. To speak of "appreciating" what we do not like is usually to talk nonsense, for the first great end of poetry is to please, and any verses that continue to please a large number of mankind are good poetry.

Another very different service that literature may do for us is emphasized by Matthew Arnold in his great essay on Wordsworth. "Poetry," he says, "is at bottom a criticism of life . . . the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life, -to the question: How to live." Now this also is not a definition because it clearly does not apply to "The Ancient Mariner," to "The Cloud," or to "Hark, hark, the lark"; and if these are not poetry, what is? Yet Arnold's remark may serve to remind us that a poem is much more than a collection of pretty but meaningless words, that many great poems, Milton's noblest sonnets, for example, or Henley's "Invictus" contain no "pretty" words, and that it is neither sweetness nor

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charm which has kept "that grand old ballad of 'Sir Patrick Spens"" alive for centuries. Anyone who will go through the poems in this book, noting how few are the pieces that attract only by the sound of their lines, will realize how important is the part that what is said plays in poetry. This does not mean that verse should moralize, preach, or impart information, for, though some great poems moralize, we usually tire of preaching poems as of preaching friends, partly because we soon exhaust what they have to give. We learn the "Psalm of Life" as boys, but, if we grow, it ceases to satisfy, our manhood. The poems, like the persons, of which we do not tire are those that continue to feed us. Perhaps they satisfy a deep craving by expressing a mood which we cannot put into words; perhaps they reveal the beauty of the physical world — its trees and rivers, its sunny meadows and wind-swept heights; often they help us to know ourselves and our fellows, or give us new points of view, new outlooks on life; many of them comfort us, encourage us, strengthen our resolution, or paint the suffering and heroism of others and hold before us a line of conduct of which we should not otherwise have thought. Then, again, they may open for us a world very unlike the one in which we move. No one of us will have all the experiences which gave rise to the lyrics that follow, but through the poems we may know something of them, may enter into many lives, into countries and centuries widely separated.

These are two of the uses of poetry: It helps us to enjoy and to understand life. The editors of this anthology were probably far from having such things consciously in mind as they worked; but, knowing them and their teaching as I do, I am confident that their choice was unconsciously moulded by the conviction that all wise study of literature

must aim at these great ends. Their conscious, immediate purpose was quite simple, to select good poetry that boys and girls will like. They are both young college graduates who, in their successful teaching of English literature in one of our best high schools, have come to feel the need of a collection of English, Scottish, Irish, and American poetry from the earliest days to the present, made especially for the American high-school pupil. Concerning each selection they have asked themselves two questions: "Is it good poetry?" and "Will our boys and girls understand it and like it?" Of course they have not been able to find room for every selection that meets these requirements, but they have deliberately included some more difficult and elusive. poems for the sake of the unusual boy or girl. The arrangement is also eminently practical. It is based on a conviction that a great obstacle to acquiring a love of poetry - which is the chief purpose of this book — lies in attempting pieces that are too difficult. This obstacle, which both the chronological and the topical order tend to magnify, is largely overcome by the present arrangement according to the four high-school years.

Finally, the editors have prepared the book in the hope that those who use it will come to look on poetry not as a task, a discipline, a duty, a test of cultivation, a classroom subject necessary for graduation, but as an opportunity and a joy, like swimming or tennis - and, like them, not always easily mastered and that they may feel towards those who are indifferent or scornful of poetry, "What fun you miss!"

RAYMOND D. HAVENS.