ABSTRACT
The present design is to record the impression that English poetry has made upon a mind that for over thirty years has been engaged constantly under its influence and frequently in its practice. George Saintsbury, at once the most stupendous and the raciest of modern critics, once boasted wryly that he had read every published line of English poetry, good, bad and indifferent, and had enjoyed it all. The removal of corruptions from a poet's text is a laudable, though sometimes a hazardous, enterprise. It will hardly be disputed, however, that the reader of a poet before this salutary process has taken place is at no appreciable disadvantage in his approach to the essential life and presiding imagination of the poet's work as against the reader who comes to it in the light of the latest scholarship.
