The Project Gutenberg eBook, Poems of To-Day: an Anthology, by Various

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Title: Poems of To-Day: an Anthology

Author: Various

Release Date: September 18, 2007 [eBook #22668]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS OF TO-DAY: AN ANTHOLOGY***

E-text prepared by Al Haines

Transcriber's note:

Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed
in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page
breaks occurred in the original book.

POEMS OF TO-DAY:

an Anthology.

London:
Published for the English Association
by Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 1918

First issued in August, 1915;
Reprinted October, 1915; January, March,
June, September, and December, 1916;
May, July, September, October, 1917,
January, February, and July, 1918.

{vii}

PREFATORY NOTE

This book has been compiled in order that boys and girls, already
perhaps familiar with the great classics of the English speech, may
also know something of the newer poetry of their own day. Most of the
writers are living, and the rest are still vivid memories among us,
while one of the youngest, almost as these words are written, has gone
singing to lay down his life for his country's cause. Although no
definite chronological limit has been set, and Meredith at least began
to write in the middle of the nineteenth century, the intention has
been to represent mainly those poetic tendencies which have become
dominant as the influence of the accepted Victorian masters has grown
weaker, and from which the poetry of the future, however it may
develope, must in turn take its start. It may be helpful briefly to
indicate the sequence of themes. Man draws his being from the heroic
Past and from the Earth his Mother; and in harmony with these he must
shape his life to what high purposes he may. Therefore this gathering
of poems falls into three groups. {viii} First there are poems of
History, of the romantic tale of the world, of our own special
tradition here in England, and of the inheritance of obligation which
that tradition imposes upon us. Naturally, there