This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler.
“Whatever youroccupation may be, and however crowded
your hours with affairs, do not fail to secure atleast
a few minutes every day for refreshment of your
inner life with a bit of poetry.”
Poems
You Ought to Know
SELECTEDBY
ELIA W. PEATTIE
(Literary Editor of the Chicago Tribune)
ILLUSTRATEDBY
ELLSWORTH YOUNG
CHICAGO NEWYORK TORONTO
Fleming H. Revell Company
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
Copyright,1902
By Tribune Company
Each illustration copyrightedseparately
Copyright,1903
Fleming H. Revell Company
INTRODUCTION
Each morning, for several months, TheChicago Tribune has published at the head of its firstcolumn, verses under the caption: “Poems You Ought toKnow.” It has explained its action by the followingquotation from Professor Charles Eliot Norton:
“Whatever your occupation may be,and however crowded your hours with affairs, do notfail to secure at least a few minutes every day for refreshmentof your inner life with a bit of poetry.”
By publishing these poems TheTribune hopes to accomplish two things: first, to inspirea love of poetry in the hearts of many of its readers who havenever before taken time or thought to read the best poems of thisand other centuries and lands; and, secondly, to remind those whoonce loved song, but forgot it among the louder voices of theworld, of the melody that enchanted them in youth.
The title has carried with it its own standard, and the poemshave been kept on a plane above jocularity or mere prettiness ofversification; rather have they tried to teach the doctrines ofcourage, of nature-love, of pure and noble melody. It hasbeen the ambition of those selecting the verses to choosesomething to lift the reader above the “petty round ofirritating concerns and duties,” and the object will havebeen achieved if it has helped anyone to “play theman,” “to go blithely about his business all theday,” with a consciousness of that abounding beauty in theworld of thought which is the common property of all men.
No anthology of English verse can be complete, and none cansatisfy all. The compiler’s individual taste,tempered and guided by established authority, is almost the onlystandard. This collection has been compiled not by one butby many thousands, and their selections here appear edited andwinnowed as the idea of the series seemed to dictate. Thebook appears at the wide-spread and almost universal request ofthose who have watched the bold experiment of a greatTwentieth-Century American