Poems #245524

The following poems were collected after his death from among his papers. They are entirely fragmentary, and bear every mark of unfinished workmanship. Absolutely no emendationsor additions have been made except for obvious mistakes of a hurried writing. It would thus be unfair to subject these pieces to a rigorous criticism. There are no indications in any of his writings that he considered them worthy of preservation, and with one or two exceptions none of them were even more than drafted in pencil on waste sheets of paper. His ideals of artistic perfection were so high that probably his full powers were never devoted to producing any finished work at a time when his experience and education were so incomplete; and that this is so is borne out by the restraint of the more typical pieces, and the purely casual nature of the subjects chosen. The collection has been made as complete as possible under the circumstances, and the sole desire of the publication is to give his intimate friends the opportunity of seeing in these few fragments his promising lyrical gift and an undoubted poetic merit, which, because it was healthy and spontaneous, might have been capable of great development.