INTRODUCTION
Partial collections of English poems, decided by a common subject or
bounded by narrow dates and periods of literary history, are made at very
short intervals, and the makers are safe from the reproach of proposing
their own personal taste as a guide for the reading of others. But a general
Anthology gathered from the whole of English literature--the whole from
Chaucer to Wordsworth--by a gatherer intent upon nothing except the
quality of poetry, is a more rare enterprise. It is hardly to be made without
tempting the suspicion--nay, hardly without seeming to hazard the
confession--of some measure of self-confidence. Nor can even the desire
to enter upon that labour be a frequent one--the desire of the heart of one
for whom poetry is veritably "the complementary life" to set up a pale for
inclusion and exclusion, to add honours, to multiply homage, to cherish, to
restore, to protest, to proclaim, to depose; and to gain the consent of a
multitude of readers to all those acts. Many years, then--some part of a
century--may easily pass between the publication of one general anthology
and the making of another.