Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/20

, into mere pitiful shadows of their proper selves. To rescue them, to cleanse their wounds and heal their bruises, and finally to trace their parentage, is all that is attempted here.

It is the fate of almost every fugitive poem, as soon as it gains a certain celebrity, to be claimed by many people, with the most amusing and astonishing results. The question of authorship is one (among many) which the anthologist must decide, and the material upon which these articles are based was accumulated during the compilation of The Home Book of Verse. It has seemed worth while to gather it together in the hope that it will settle certain historic and more or less heated controversies once for all.