Louis Untermeyer Concise Treasury of Great Poems English and American

Annotation

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. If poetry is the most potent of human communications, it should also be the simplest and the most logical expression. It should, some say, require no particular cogitation, no after thoughts, no exercise of the speculative mind. But poetry, being the product of intuition as well as experience, transcends plain statements; it surpasses fact and leaps ahead of logic. Simple arithmetic to the contrary, a poem is not the sum of its parts. A poem is greater than its parts; it is even something beyond its parts. It is prompted by an idea, enhanced by rhyme, pointed by meter, colored by metaphor. This fusion, this enrichment and intensification, has created a new thing: the poem itself, which is beyond analysis - even, at times, beyond logic.