SELECTED AND EDITED BY CLAUDE M. FUESS AND HENRY N. SANBORN INSTRUCTORS IN ENGLISH IN PHILLIPS ACADEMY New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1912 All rights reserved INTRODUCTION NARRATIVE poetry is distinguished from other types of verse in that it aims to relate a connected series of events and, therefore, deals primarily with actions, rather than with thoughts or emotions. This definition, however, simple as it appears to be in theory, is often difficult to apply as a test because other matter is blended with the pure narrative. In any story where the situation is made prominent, description may be required to make clear the scene and explain movements to the reader; thus Enoch Arden begins with a word picture of a sea-coast town. Again it is often necessary to analyze the motives which actuate certain characters, and so it becomes necessary to introduce exposition of some sort into the plot. The poems in this collection serve to enforce the lesson that the four standard rhetorical forms - narration, description, exposition, and argumentation are constantly being combined and welded in a complicated way. In cases where these various literary elements are apparently in a tangle, a classification, if it be made at all, must be based on the design of the poem as a whole, and the emphasis and proportion given to the respective elements by the author. If the stress is laid on the recounting of the events which make up a unified action, and if the other factors are made subordinate and sub |