Excerpt from A Sixteenth Century Anthology Style, to the poets of the sixteenth century, was much of what went to the mahingof that broad simplicity, that magnificently obvious eloquence, which seems to us now to have the universal quality of the greatest poetry. The poets of the nineteenth century are no nearer to nature, though they seem more individual because they have made an art of extracting rare emotions, and because they take them selves to pieces more cunningly. Brayton's great sonnet is the epilogue, and S penser's great poem the epithalamium, for all lovers; but it needs another Shelley to find out love in the labyrinth of Epipsychidion Allthat is greatest in the poetry of the sixteenth century is open to all the world, like a wood, or Arcadia, in which no road is fenced with prohibitions, and the flowers are all for the picking. A nd when, in the nineteenth century, poetry began again, it was to the poets of the sixteenth century that the new poets looked back, finding the pattern there for what they were making over again for themselves. A few snatches from E liea bethan song-books were enough to direct the first awaken ings of song in Blake Wordsworth found his gnomic and rational style, as of a lofty prose, in Samuel Daniel; Keats rifled the best sweets of Lodge's orchard; and Shelley found in the elegies of Michael Drayton the model of his incomparable style of familiar speech in verse, the style of the Letter to Maria Gisborne Every reader of modern verse will find something contem po rary in even the oldest of the poems which follow; partly because modern verse is directly founded on this verse of the sixteenth century, and partly because the greatest poetry is con temporary with all the ages. 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.
