PREFACE

The immediate aim of the compilers of this book has been to give boys and girls of high-school age a collection of poetry which they will like, and which will lead them to read more poetry. Poems from classical and contemporary fields have been chosen, regardless of chronological periods and of schools of poetry; the main consideration has been the poem itself and the appeal that it makes.

The arrangement of the poems into four parts has been done not from any idea of establishing artificial divisions for criticism, but with the thought that, to ensure an abiding love of poetry, the young reader must be given what he likes and through his likes be stimulated and urged to a wider and keener appreciation. The four parts correspond roughly to the four years of the secondary school, and the poems in each part are those which appeal primarily to the students of those years. Some of the poems will be but temporary pleasures; others, which have a universality of appeal, will abide with the reader always. The editors offer this volume, therefore, not as a mere textbook, but as an embodiment of that song

The same that oft-times hath

Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors of this volume thank the following publishers for their courtesy in granting permission to reprint copyrighted material:

D. Appleton and Company (New York) — for poems from The Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant; and from The Tar Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus, by Joel Chandler Harris.

The Bobbs-Merrill Company - for James Whitcomb Riley's "When the Frost Is on the Punkin," from Neghborly Poems, copyright 1891. Used by special permission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Brandt and Brandt- for "God's World," from Renascence, by Edna St. Vincent Millay, published by Harper and Brothers, copyright 1917 by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Brentano's (New York) for selections from The Complete Poems of Francis Ledwidge.

William Collins Sons and Co., Ltd. - for "Boats at Night," by Edward Shanks.

J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd. (and Lionel W. Claxton) - for "Sea-Gulls," by Nora Holland.

Dodd Mead and Company

for the selections from The Collected Poems

of Rupert Brooke; for poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Haniel Long, Sarojini Naidu, Henry Newbolt, and Marjorie Pickthall, copyright by Dodd Mead and Company.

George H. Doran Company - for "The Hills," from Songs of the Workaday World, by Berton Braley, copyright 1915; for "Things," from Vigils, by Aline Kilmer, copyright 1921; for "Trees," from Trees and Other Poems, by Joyce Kilmer, copyright 1914. Doubleday, Page & Company - for the selections from Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman, copyright by Doubleday, Page & Company; for "The Song of the Bow," from Songs of Action, by Arthur Conan Doyle; for the poems of Rudyard Kipling, copyright 1892, 1899, 1910, by Rudyard Kipling.

E. P. Dutton and Company - for "Deserted," by Madison Cawein, from Vale of Tempe; for "The Spires of Oxford," from Spires of Oxford and Other Poems, by Winifred Letts; for "The Trenches," from Eidola, by Frederic Manning; for "Falling Asleep," "Slumber Song," "Aftermath," and "The Dug-Out," from Picture-Show; for "The RearGuard," "Dreamers," and "Attack," from Counter-Attack; and "The Road," from The Old Huntsman and Other Poems, by Siegfried Sassoon. The Four Seas Company - for selections from The Mountainy Singer, by Joseph Campbell (Seosamh MacCathmhaoil), copyright 1919 by The Four Seas Company.

Henry Holt and Company - for "Fog," from Chicago Poems, and for "Grass," from Cornhuskers, by Carl Sandburg; for "Birches," from Mountain Interval, for "The Runaway," from New Hampshire, and for "Mending Wall," from North of Boston, by Robert Frost. Houghton Mifflin Company - for selections from the Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, from the Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, from the Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from the Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell, from the Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Poems by John Hay, Poems by Edward Rowland Sill, Davy and the Goblin, by Charles E. Carryl, and Bayard Taylor's Poems, used by permission of, and by special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers.

B. W. Huebsch, Inc.

for "Lone Dog," by Irene Rutherford McLeod from Songs to Save a Soul; and for the selections by Jean Starr Untermeyer from Growing Pains.

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. - for the selections reprinted from Verse, by Adelaide Crapsey, by permission of, and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., authorized publishers.

Leonard Scott Publication Company (New York) — for permission to use "The Voices" and "Dawn," which appeared in Blackwood's Magazine. Little, Brown and Company - for selections from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.

The Macmillan Company for "Dover Beach," "West London," "A Summer Night," "Quiet Work," "The Better Part," "Philomela," and "The Forsaken Merman," from The Poetical Works of Matthew