Book Description

Excerpt from The Haunted Hour: An Anthology This does not attempt to be an inclusive anthology. The ghostly poetry of the late war alone would have made a book as large as this; and an inclusive scheme would have ended as' a six-volume Encyclopedia of Ghostly Verse. I hope that this may be called for some day. The present book has been held to the conventional limits of the type of small anthology which may be read without weariness (i hope) by the exclusion not only of many long and dreary ghost-poems, but many others which it was very hard to leave out. I have not considered as ghost-poems anything but poems which related to the return of spirits to earth. Thus The Blessed Damozel, a poem of Spirits in heaven, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, whose heroine may be a fairy or Witch, and whose ghosts are presented in dream only, do not belong in this classification; nor do such poems as Mathilde Blind's lovely sonnet, The Dead Are Ever with Us, class as ghost-poems; for in these the dead are living in ourselves in a half-metaphorical sense. If a poem would be a ghost-story, in short, I have considered it a ghost-poem, not otherwise. In this connection I wish to thank Mabel Cleland Lud lum for her unwearied and intelligent assistance with the selection 'and compilation of the book; and Aline Kilmer for help in its revision and arrangement. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.