INTRODUCTION THIS volume of Little Masterpieces of English Poetry contains idyls and stories in verse. It covers a region lying between the ballad, which is almost, if not altogether, objective and impersonal, and the descriptive and reflective lyric, in which the personal thought and feeling of the poet is the main element. The poems in this volume are marked by a blending of the two elements. They are narratives which have in them something of the reflective and descriptive element. Of course this must not be taken as a hard and fast classification, nor are the divisions within the volume to be so regarded. Many of the poems here have aspects and relations which connect them with the poems in other groups. The idyls have been separated from the rest on the principle of classification, that they are poems which call up pictures of life and landscape for the sake of the pictures themselves. There is emotional coloring and usually a human figure or figures in the foreground. The difficulty arises with poems like Shelley's Sensitive Plant and Lowell's Rhecus. The former, which has in it something of the elegy and something of the allegory, has been put with the idyls because the picture which it calls up seems to be the principal thing. On the other hand, Rhacus is in many respects truly an idyl, but finds place among poems of another class where the legendary and symbolic element is thought to predominate. Longfellow's The Building of the Ship and several others are not mere stories. They are allegorical and symbolic. Their purpose is to teach a lesson or to indicate a similitude. Most of the stories also which deal with real or invented myth and legend are of the same general class, so that we have thought it convenient and fitting to put these legendary and allegorical pieces together in one group within the volume. Another variety of story in verse, mainly very recent in composition, bears striking resemblance in its aim and effect, its intensified unity, to the now pretty generally recognized prose-form, the short story,-as distinguished from the story which happens to be short. An incident is narrated, as in Sill's The Fool's Prayer and Bret Harte's Ramon, or a situation is described in narrative form, as in Hood's The Dream of Eugene Aram, not for the story, but for its emotional value. This class is closely connected with the dramatic monologue and the character-piece. Arnold's The Forsaken Merman and Mrs. Browning's Mother and Poet have been considered far enough over the border to be included here. Such stories may be said to differ from idyls mainly in their more dramatic quality. Three or four poems of death and bereavement, pointing out a connection with elegiac verse, have been put together in this section, because they seemed dramatic and single in their emotional appeal. After the idyls, the legendary and allegorical pieces, and the short-stories in verse have been taken out, there yet remain a large number of tales and brief epics. There is no word to denote the short epic, though the epic quality manifests itself quite as plainly in short poems as in long ones. There are, besides, short romances and plain tales of every-day life. These poems have been grouped together in the largest section of the volume and stand third in the arrangement. Some of the poems, as Byron's The Destruction of Sennacherib, are ballad-like. The Heathen Chinee has in it perhaps something of the ballad and something of the character-piece. It has been put here with other poems of a homely nature rather than elsewhere. The same may be said of Holmes's The One-Hoss Shay, which is also a hard poem to classify. The arrangement of this section and of the whole volume, aside from the tentative and rather difficult boundaries, has been made with a view to harmonious juxtaposition and easy transition. Far greater difficulties than those of arrangement have confronted us in the matter of selection. Much of the finest poetry in the language is short narrative; and some inevitable choices have been debarred, because they were considered somewhat too long to be included in a collection of little masterpieces. HARDIN CRAIG. |