Читать книгу My Commonplace Book онлайн

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It must be remembered that this book is not an anthology. A commonplace book is usually a collection of reminders made by a young man who cannot afford an extensive library. There is no system in such a collection. A book is borrowed and extracts made from it; another book by the same author is bought and no extract made from it. On the one hand a favourite verse, although well known, is written out for some reason or other; on the other hand hundreds of beautiful poems are omitted. So far from this being an anthology, I have, as a matter of course, omitted many poems that since the seventy-eighty period have become general favourites; and, as regards the most beautiful gems of our literature, they are almost all excluded. There are for example, only a few lines from Shakespeare.

Some exceptions have, however, been made. In a series of word-pictures, a few of the best-known passages will be found. A few others have been included for reasons that will readily appear; they either form part of a series or the reason is apparent from the notes. Apart from these I have retained Blanco White’s great sonnet and “The Night has a thousand eyes,” written by F. W. Bourdillon when an undergraduate at Worcester College, Oxford, because with regard to these I had an interesting and instructive experience. I accidentally discovered that of four well-read men (two at least of them more thorough students of poetry than myself) two were ignorant of the one poem and two of the other. Seeking an explanation, I turned to the anthologies. I could not find in any of them Bourdillon’s little gem until I came to the comparatively recent Oxford Book of Victorian Verse and The Spirit of Man. The Blanco White sonnet I could find nowhere except in collections of sonnets, which in my opinion are little read. It will be observed that in anthologies alone can Blanco White’s one and only poem be kept alive.