POETRY OF THE PEOPLE COMPRISING POEMS ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE HISTORY AND NATIONAL SPIRIT OF ENGLAND, PREFACE THIS little volume has a very modest but distinct and, we think, unique purpose, to supply the reading public and the schools with a compact body not necessarily of the most highly polished or artistic poems in the English tongue, but of those which are at once most simple, most hearty, most truly characteristic of the people, their tradition, history, and spirit. By Poetry of the People we do not mean only ballads of countryside or battlefield, or of street or village, hearth or market, not only the production of the folk-improviser or his succeeding bard long ago buried behind the hills of anonymity: but poetry that the people possess and occupy (or should occupy) because it is of their blood and bone and sinew: poetry sometimes by, and sometimes not, but always for, the people; poems that were household words with our fathers and mothers, and lay close to the heart because of the heart; poems that even now beat in the bosom of the Folk and find utterance in the hour of stress; poems which more often than not are all the truer art because they are not artful. It may have appeared to others, as it has to us, that literature in verse is not learned nor enjoyed nor even read by young or old as much as it used to be. One explanation of this neglect is very probably that in the place of unsophisticated poetry, such as generations of our forefathers |