Louis Untermeyer
Published: 2017-02-16
Total Pages: 580
Get eBook
Excerpt from A Concise Treasury of Great Poems English and American: From the Foundations of the English Spirit to the Outstanding Poetry of Our Own Time; With Lives of the Poets and Historical Settings Selected and Integrated If poetry is the most potent of human communications, it should also be the simplest and the most logical expression. It should, some say, require no particular cogitation, no after thoughts, no exercise of the speculative mind. But poetry, being the product of intuition as well as experience, transcends plain statements; it surpasses fact and leaps ahead of logic. Simple arithmetic to the contrary, a poem is not the sum of its parts. A poem is greater than its parts; it is even something beyond its parts. It is prompted by an idea, enhanced by rhyme, pointed by meter, colored by metaphor. This fusion, this enrichment and intensification, has created a new thing: the poem itself, which is beyond analysis - even, at times, beyond logic. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.