The New England poets

William Cranston Lawton

Excerpt from The New England Poets. After twenty years devoted to the study and teaching of remoter and richer literatures, the demand for "University Extension" lectures first suggested a return to these earliest guides of our New England boyhood. Like that boyhood itself, these benignant figures have already something of the perspective which Time alone can bestow. Two of the six I never even saw. The men who, like Colonel Higginson and Professor Norton, have been our indulgent Mentors, were in their turn the younger associates of the group here discussed. Nevertheless our Yankee loyalty throbs too warmly from heart to heart to permit mere cold analytical criticism. But must impartial or fruitful criticism be cold, remote, even semi-hostile? Can we not know aright, and fairly judge, those whom we love best, and to whom we owe most? Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands...