Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Treasury of Seventeenth Century English Verse: From the Death of Shakespeare to the Restoration (1616-1660)
Waller, Herbert, Marvell and Donne, except for two or three or four poems of each which are as familiar in anthologies as are many of Milton and Herrick. I have therefore excluded from these pages such poems as Go, lovely rose, Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind, W'hoe'er she be - That not impossible She, Ask me no more, where Jove bestows, Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, They are all gone into the world of light, Well then, I now do plainly see, The Bermudas, and their like. It has been a difficult business, and some readers will think I ought to have omitted more poems than I have, others less. The whole process of collecting these poems has been both a lengthy and a difficult one, and if I have not pleased (to beg the question), it has not been for want of trying. Since, again, this period has not received its fair share of appreciation, I have found it necessary to write short biographical, bibliographical, explanatory and critical notes to its poets and anonymous poems. For the anthologist, I agree, silence is best - where he tramps the turnpike road. Biographical notices of well-known poets I have dispensed with and the others are informal and purely general, except where some interesting or enter taining detail or quotation from Anthony Wood and other biographers called for admission. Spelling is debateable ground, but I have modernized it, except where rhyme or metre said no. I have also refused to spell aorists and past participles without the e - thus damn'd since there is no reason for it at all, and when the ed is an extra syllable, it is indicated ed.' There is no difference in in?ection and structure between seventeenth century and modern spelling, and to preserve the former is little else than an external archaism. For the text, I have gone to accredited modern editions of these poets, where they exist; where not.
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