I AM afraid that the pieces collected in this book may seem
to be too heterogeneous and to betray too wayward and too
undisciplined a spirit in the author. They have indeed been
composed for different purposes, often for special occasions,
and they cover very various ground. None the less nearly
all of them treat of poetry in some aspect or other, and since
the study of poetry is after all as much a single pursuit as
that of music or painting, I hope that they may be found to
have some connection with each other and to display some-
thing like a point of view or at least to discuss matters with
which most lovers of poetry are concerned and which are
not too distantly related to the subject treated in the first
chapter.

I am grateful to those who have allowed me to print here
what has already appeared in earlier versions elsewhere, to
the University Presses of Oxford and Cambridge, to Notting-
ham University, to the Böhlau-Verlag, Münster, to Messrs.
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and to the editors and proprietors
of Golden Horizon, Speculum, Atlante, Oxford Slavonic
Papers, and The Sewanee Review. I am also grateful to the
following for permission to quote from copyright works:
Messrs. Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd., for the passages
from Verses from Pushkin, by Oliver Elton; the author's
executrix for the lines from translations of poems by Ler-
montov and Pushkin, from Russian Literature, by the Hon. Maurice Baring
, published by Messrs. William Heinemann,
Ltd.; Mrs. Laurence Binyon, for the passages from her
husband's version of the Purgatorio of Dante; Mr. Basil
Blackwell, for the extracts from Poems of Gil Vicente, by
Aubrey Bell; the Syndics of the Cambridge University
Press, for the extracts from The Odes of Horace, by Hugh Macnaghten
; East and West, Ltd., for the lines from
Lermontov's Because, as translated by the late John Pollen

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