CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION I PRELUDE THE poems in this volume are all the work of men who wrote after the year 1795. Roughly speaking, they represent the poetical spirit of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, they are chiefly lyrical in character. Two questions about them any interested student is likely to ask. First, what was this quartercentury like, in England—what at that time particularly stirred and interested the English people? Second, what is a lyric poem? The first question, whether the reader has asked it or not, is one which always should be asked by any reader. Literature, good or bad, never proceeds from a vacuum. A writer is always to some extent the product and the representative of the age he lives in. Now England, in this particular quarter-century, was, like the rest of Europe, perhaps most gravely interested in what we vaguely call "democracy"-that is, the question of how best to govern men by educating them to govern themselves. The French Revolution had begun in 1789, continued for five or six years, and then been succeeded by the triumphs of Napoleon. The French Revolution, like the American Revolution of 1776-1784, was in its way an indication of this great and growing world |