Page:A complete index volumes 1-25 of Poet Lore.djvu/11



HE publication of this Index of a remarkable periodical during an uninterrupted course of twenty-five years is due 'mainly to the many requests for such a work received from the magazine's subscribers. Their plea is that the pages have contained so much material of value to the literary world that an Index would constitute an invaluable reference book.

We feel that it is not out of place to give here for those readers who have become acquainted with POET LORE during recent years, a brief, historical sketch, mentioning a few of those achievements which have placed the magazine among pioneer periodicals.

Established in 1889 by Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke as a "monthly magazine devoted to Shakespeare and Browning, and to a comparative study of literature," its appearance met with unusual success.

During the first six years of publication it firmly took its stand as a journal that did its own thinking. It spoke of Ibsen as "below no one but Shakespeare" to a nation that had heard only enough of him to jeer. It established its reputation for foresight, the ultimate reason for its greater success in later years, by giving its readers a review of Shakespeare's influence on Japanese literature. This was written eighteen years before the general readers in this country realized that there was such a thing as great literature in Japan.

For the next seven years, the magazine continually added it discovered and introduced to this country the lyric poet, Mistral, with the existence of whom other periodicals were not familiar until fourteen years later when he shared with Echegaray the Nobel prize for literature. A year later POET LORE made its readers acquainted with the work of Strindberg, who has but recently become well known in America. Bohemian literature was taken up in 1892. Bjornson's play, A Glove translated from the original Norwegian version of En Hanske and authorized by Bjornson himself appeared the same year.

Maeterlinck's first work to appear in English was The