Ardours and Endurances; Also, A Faun's Holiday & Poems and Phantasies

Author of Invocation: War Poems and Others
NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS


My thanks are due to the editor of the Times and of the Nation , to the editors of the Palatine Review , and to Messrs. Blackwell, Oxford, the publishers of Oxford Poetry, 1915, and Oxford Poetry, 1916, for permission to reprint certain of these poems.
R. M. B. N.
1917.

1. Of the nature of the poet :
We are (often) so impressed by the power of poetry that we think of it as something made by a wonderful and unusual person: we do not realize the fact that all the wonder and marvel is in our own brains, that the poet is ourselves. He speaks our language better than we do merely because he is more skilful with it than we are; his skill is part of our skill, his power of our power; generations of English-speaking men and women have made us sensible to these things, and our sensibility comes from the same source that the poet's power of stimulating it comes from. Given a little more sensitiveness to external stimuli, a little more power of associating ideas, a co-ordination of the functions of expression somewhat more apt, a sense of rhythm somewhat keener than the average—given these things we should be poets, too, even as he is.... He is one of us.

2. Of what English poetry consists :