AN ANTHOLOGY OF CATHOLIC POETS
DREAMS AND IMAGES
AN ANTHOLOGY
of
CATHOLIC POETS
Edited by
JOYCE KILMER
TORONTO
THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY
LIMITED
Copyright, 1917,
Boni & Liveright, Inc.
Printed in the U. S. of America
For advice and assistance in collecting and arrangingthese poems, I am grateful to many friends, especiallyto Mr. T. R. Smith, Miss Caroline Giltinan and Mr. JohnBunker. The publishers, editors and authors who havekindly consented to let me use copyright material arenumerous and I assure them of my deep sense of obligation.In particular I desire to thank the following publishersfor their generous permission to use all that Irequired from their lists: Charles Scribner’s Sons, JohnLane Company, Small, Maynard & Company, P. J. KennedySons, Frederick A. Stokes Company, The Catholic World,Houghton Mifflin Company, The Encyclopaedia Press,Henry Holt & Company, The Devin-Adair Company,Little, Brown & Company, The Macmillan Company,Elkin Mathews, The Ave Maria, Laurence Gomme, andWilfrid Meynell.
J. K.
To
Rev. James J. Daly, S.J.
[Pg vii]
This is not a collection of devotional poems. It isnot an attempt to rival Orby Shipley’s admirable“Carmina Mariana” or any other similar anthology.What I have tried to do is to bring together the poemsin English that I like best that were written by Catholicssince the middle of the Nineteenth Century.There are in this book poems religious in theme;there are also love-songs and war songs. But I thinkthat it may be called a book of Catholic poems. Fora Catholic is not a Catholic only when he prays; he isa Catholic in all the thoughts and actions of his life.And when a Catholic attempts to reflect in wordssome of the Beauty of which as a poet he is conscious,he cannot be far from prayer and adoration.
The Church has never been without her great poets.And in the Nineteenth Century there was a splendidrenascence of Catholic poetry written in English. Ithad already begun when Francis Thompson wrote hisEssay on Shelley, in which he longed for the by-gonedays when poetry was “the lesser sister and helpmateof the Church; the minister to the mind, as the Churchto the soul.” The members of the Pre-RaphaeliteBrotherhood were not Catholics, but their movementwas related to the renascence of Catholic poetry—itwas an attempt to restore to art and letters some[Pg viii]of the glory of the days before what is called theReformation. Coventry Patmore carried the theoriesof the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to their logicalconclusion, as Newman did those of the Tractarians.Coventry Patmore became a Catholic, and found in hisFaith his inspiration and his theme. And his discipleFrancis Thompson, born to the Faith which Patmorereached by way of the divine adventure of conversion,