What is poetry? And, if that question can be answered, what is a good, and what a bad, poem? And who, among those who have written rhyming lines with clearly marked rhythms, or lines which do not rhyme and with rhythms which may be discernible only to the author, may be called distinguished poets? How does one choose when going about the business of making a collection of "great" poems?
There have been many attempts at definition. Poetry is "the music of the soul" (Voltaire), "the art of uniting pleasure with truth" (Samuel Johnson), "the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself" (William Hazlitt), "the record of the best and happiest moments of the best minds" (Shelley). It is that which "makes my body so cold no fire can warm me," and makes me "feel as if the top of my head were taken off" (Emily Dickinson). "Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits .. a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanation" (Carl Sandburg). It is "not the assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us" (T. S. Eliot).
"The poet is the rock of defense for human nature" (William Wordsworth); he "brings the whole soul of man into activity" (Coleridge); he "has a fixed focus which all the talk and all the staring of the world has been unable to fix before him" (Archibald MacLeish).
Yet all these definitions, and there are many more, do not answer the question, "What is a great poem and what an insignificant one?"
Perhaps, as Albert Einstein said of truth, great poetry is "that which stands the test of experience." Neither truth nor greatness in poetry can be considered an absolute for everyone. No anthology of poems has ever been made which has not stimulated adverse criticism, both from those who are disappointed because many of their favorites, those poems which they consider great, have been omitted, and from those who scorn as trivial some of the inclusions. Generally speaking, these reactions are, for most people, reflections of the "test of experience" rather than the results of exact critical standards.
When one reads, or listens to the reading of, a poem, its meaning and value for him are conveyed by more than intel- lectual comprehension. He experiences it as he does music, or a sunset, or a relationship with a loved one. His estimate is not something which can be put fully into words. If the poem becomes a living part of him, if that which he experiences may be re-created at each new contact with it, it be comes for him one of that precious collection which makes up the personal anthology that every true lover of poetry possesses within him.
Each of the selections in this group of famous poems has been chosen because it has stood the test of experience for a great many people, and seems likely to reach the hearts of many more for years to come.
—from the Introduction
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