An Anthology of World Poetry [antikvár]

PREFACE The scope of this anthology is so wide—in time from the thirty-fifth century B.C. to the twentieth century A.D. and in space from China and Japan around through India, Persia, Arabia, Palestine, Egypt, Greece, and Rome to Europe and America—that there is no poet in human hi^ory who might not have found a place in it had he ever fallen into the hands of a becoming translator. Not all the poets, of course, are here. The book, big as it is, would have been ftill bigger had I found more material exailly suited to my purpose, which was to provide a colledlion revealing those riches of the world's poetry thus far gathered into readable English. For my purpose was not to "represent" these various poetical! literatures. My experience with previous colledlions which have attempted to do such a thing for "The Poets and Poetry of Europe," "The Poets and Poetry of Greece and Rome," and so on has convinced me that nothing is deadlier than a compilation designed with reference to the originals alone. This is an anthology of the world's beft poetry in the beft English I could unearth, and when I found no good English at all I left the poet out. Pindar, for instance, is absent from these pages not because I was unwilling to accept his great reputation but because I discovered no English version of him which made him seem great—or even, for that matter, readable. Hence also some apparent oddities in the vii