Excerpt from Poems New editions of books are a venture for publishers rather than authors. The author has committed his rash act once for all at the beginning and he can hardly retract or repeat it. Nevertheless if I had not connived and collaborated at this selection of verses written (almost all of them) in my younger days, they probably would not have reappeared. I there fore owe an apology to my best critics and friends, who have always warned me that I am no poet; all the more since, in the sense in which they mean the word, I heartily agree with them. Of impassioned tenderness or Dionysiac frenzy I have nothing, nor even of that magic and pregnancy of phrase - really the creation of a fresh idiom - which marks the high lights of poetry. Even if my tempera ment had been naturally warmer, the fact that the English language (and I can write no other with assurance) was not my mother-tongue. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.

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