Poems You Ought to Know

This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler.
“ Whatever your occupation may be , and however crowded your hours with affairs , do not fail to secure at least a few minutes every day for refreshment of your inner life with a bit of poetry .”
SELECTED BY ELIA W. PEATTIE ( Literary Editor of the Chicago Tribune )
ILLUSTRATED BY ELLSWORTH YOUNG
CHICAGO NEW YORK TORONTO Fleming H. Revell Company LONDON AND EDINBURGH
Copyright, 1902 By Tribune Company
Each illustration copyrighted separately
Copyright, 1903 Fleming H. Revell Company
Each morning, for several months, The Chicago Tribune has published at the head of its first column, verses under the caption: “Poems You Ought to Know.” It has explained its action by the following quotation from Professor Charles Eliot Norton:
“ Whatever your occupation may be , and however crowded your hours with affairs , do not fail to secure at least a few minutes every day for refreshment of your inner life with a bit of poetry .”
By publishing these poems The Tribune hopes to accomplish two things: first, to inspire a love of poetry in the hearts of many of its readers who have never before taken time or thought to read the best poems of this and other centuries and lands; and, secondly, to remind those who once loved song, but forgot it among the louder voices of the world, of the melody that enchanted them in youth.
The title has carried with it its own standard, and the poems have been kept on a plane above jocularity or mere prettiness of versification; rather have they tried to teach the doctrines of courage, of nature-love, of pure and noble melody. It has been the ambition of those selecting the verses to choose something to lift the reader above the “petty round of irritating concerns and duties,” and the object will have been achieved if it has helped anyone to “play the man,” “to go blithely about his business all the day,” with a consciousness of that abounding beauty in the world of thought which is the common property of all men.