Anthologies
The Norton Anthology of English Literature
Sixth Edition
General Editor, M. H. Abrams
New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Volume II.
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE SIXTH EDITION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Romantic Period (1785-1830)
William Blake (1757-1827)
From POETICAL SKETCHES
To Spring
To Autumn
To the Evening Star
Song ("How sweet I roam'd from field to field")
Song ("Memory, hither come")
Mad Song
To the Muses
All Religions are One
There Is No Natural Religion [a]
There Is No Natural Religions [b]
SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE
From Songs of Innocence
Introduction
The Ecchoing Green
The Lamb
The Little Black Boy
The Chimney Sweeper
The Divine Image
Holy Thursday
Nurse's Song
Infant Joy
From Songs of Experience
Introduction
Earth's Answer
The Clod & the Pebble
Holy Thursday
The Chimney Sweeper
Nurse's Song
The Sick Rose
The Fly
The Tyger
My Pretty Rose Tree
Ah Sun-flower
The Garden of Love
London
The Human Abstract
Infant Sorrow
A Poison Tree
To Tirzah
A Divine Image
Robert Burns (1759-1796)
To a Mouse
To a Louse
Green frow the rashes
Holy Willie's Prayer
Tam o' Shanter
Afton Water
Ae fond kiss
Ye flowery banks
Scots, wha hae
For A' That and A' That
A Red, Red Rose
Auld Lang Syne
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
A Vindiction of the Rights of Woman
Introduction
Chap. 2. The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed
From Chp. 4. Observations on the State of Degradation to
Which Woman is Reduced by Various Causes
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
From LYRICAL BALLADS
Simon Lee
We Are Seven
Lines Written in Early Spring
Expostulation and Reply
The Tables Turned
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802)
[The Subject and Language of Poetry]
["What Is a Poet?"]
["Emotion Recollected in Tranquillity"]
Strange fits of passion have I known
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Three years she grew
A slumber did my spirit seal
I travelled among unknown men
Lucy Gray
The Two April Mornings
Nutting
The Ruined Cottage
Michael
Written in March
Resolution and Independence
I wandered lonely as a cloud
My heart leaps up
Ode: Intimations of Immortality
Ode to Duty
The Solitary Reaper
Elegiac Stanzas
SONNETS
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
It is a beauteous evening
London, 1802
The world is too much with us
Surprised by joy
Mutability
Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways
Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg
Prospectus to The Recluse
THE PRELUDE, OR GROWTH OF A POET'S MIND
Book First, Introduction, Childhood, and School-time
Book Second, School-time continued
Book Third. Residence at Cambridge
[Experiences at St. John's College. The "Heroic Argument"]
Book Fourth. Summer Vacation
[The Walks with His Terrier. The Circuit of the Lake]
["The Surface of Past Time." The Walk Home from the
Dance. The Discharged Soldier]
Book Fifth. Books
[The Dream of the Arab]
[The Boy of Winander]
["The Mystery of Words"]
Book Sixth. Cambridge, and the Alps
["Human Nature Seeming Born Again"]
[Crossing Simplon Pass]
Book Seventh. Residence in London
[The Blind Beggar. Bartholomew Fair]
Book Eighth. Retrospect, Love of Nature leading to Love of Man
[The Shepherd in the Mist. Man Still Subordinate to Nature]
Book Ninth. Residence in France
[Paris and Orleans. Becomes a "Patriot"]
Book Tenth. France continued
[The Revolution: Paris and England]
[The Reign of Terror. Nightmares]
Book Eleventh. France, concluded
[Retrospect: "Bliss Was It in That Dawn." Recourse
to "Reason's Naked Self"]
[Crisis, Breakdown, and Recovery]
Book Twelfth. Imagination and Taste, how impaired and restored
Book Thirteenth. Subject concluded
[Return to "Life's Familiar Face"]
[Discovery of His Poetic Subject. Salisbury Plain. Sight of "a
New World"]
Book Fourteenth. Conclusion
[The Vision on Mount Snowdon. Fear vs. Love Resolved. Imagination]
[Conclusion: "The Mind of Man"]
Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855)
From The Alfoxden Journal
From The Grasmere Journals
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
The Two Drovers
Lochinvar
Jock of Hazeldean
The Dreary Change
Proud Maisie
Lucy Ashton's Song
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
The Eolian Harp
This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Kubla Khan
Christabel
Frost at Midnight
Dejection: An Ode
The Pains of Sleep
Phantom
To William Wordsworth
Recollections of Love
On Donne's Poetry
Work without Hope
Constancy to an Ideal Object
Epitaph
Biographia Literaria
Chapter 1
[The discipline of his taste at school]
[Bowle's sonnets]
[Comparison between the poets before and since Mr. Pope]
Chapter 4
[Mr. Wordsworth's earlier poems]
[On fancy and imagination -- the investigation of the distinction
important to the fine arts]
Chapter 13
[On the imagination, or esemplastic power]
Chapter 14. Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects
originally proposed -- preface to the second edition -- the ensuing
controversy, its causes and acrimony -- philosophic definitions
of a term and poetry with scholia
Chapter 17
[Examination of the tenets peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth]
[Rustic life (above all, low and rustic life) especially
unfavorable to the formation of a human diction -- the best parts
of language the products of philosophers, not clowns or shepherds]
[The language of Milton as much the language of real life,
yea, incomparably more so that that of the cottager]
Lectures on Shakespeare
[Fancy and Imagination in Shakespeare's Poetry]
[Mechanic vs. Organic Form]
The Statesman's Manual
[On Symbol and Allegory]
[The Satanic Hero]
Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
A Letter to Wordsworth
Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago
The Two Races of Men
Old China
William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
On Gusto
My First Acquaintance with Poets
From Mr. Wordsworth
Thomas De Quincey (1758-1859)
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Preliminary Confessions
[The Prostitute Ann]
Introduction to the Pains of Opium
[The Malay]
The Pains of Opium
[Opium Reveries and Dreams]
On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth
Alexander Pope
[The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power]
Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866)
The Four Ages of Poetry
The War Song of Dinas Vawr
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos
She walks in beauty
They say that Hope is happiness
When we two parted
Stanzas for Music
Darkness
So, we'll go no more a roving
When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home
Stanzas Written on the Road between Florence and Pisa
January 22nd. Missolonghi
CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE
Canto I
["Sin's Long Labyrinth"]
Canto 3
["Once More Upon the Waters"]
[Waterloo]
[Napoleon]
[Switzerland]
Canto 4
[Venice]
["Farewell!"]
Manfred
The Vision of Judgment
DON JUAN
Fragment
Canto I
[Juan and Donna Julia]
Canto 2
[The Shipwreck]
[Juan and Haidee]
Canto 3
[Juan and Haidee]
Canto 4
[Juan and Haidee]
LETTERS
Memorandum (May 22, 1811)
To Francis Hodgson (Sept. 3, 1811)
To James Hogg (Mar. 24, 1814)
To Leigh Hunt (Sept - Oct 30, 1815)
To Thomas Moore (Jan. 28, 1817)
To John Murray (Sept. 15, 1817)
To John Cam Hobhouse and Douglas Kinnaird (Jan. 19, 1819)
To John Murray (Apr. 6, 1819)
To Douglas Kinnaird (Oct. 26, 1819)
To Percy Bysshe Shelley (Apr. 26, 1821)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Mutability
To Wordsworth
Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude
Mont Blanc
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
Ozymandias
Stanzas Written in Dejection -- December 1818, near Naples
A Song: "Men of England"
England in 1819
To Sidmouth and Castlereagh
The Indian Girl's Song [The Indian Serenade]
Ode to the West Wind
Prometheus Unbound
Preface
From Act I
Act 2
Scene 4
Scene 5
Act 3
Scene I
From Scene 4
From Act 4
The Cloud
To a Sky-Lark
Song of Apollo
To Night
To -- [Music, when soft voices die]
The flower that smiles today
O World, O Life, O Time
Choruses from Hellas
Worlds on worlds
The world's great age
Adonais
A Dirge
When the lamp is shattered
To Jane. The Invitation
To Jane (The keen stars were twinkling)
Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici
The Triumph of Life
From A Defence of Poetry
John Keats (1795-1821)
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
Sleep and Poetry
["O for Ten Years"]
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
Endymion: A Poetic Romance
Preface
Book I
[A Thing of Beauty]
[The "Pleasure Thermometer"]
On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again
When I have fears that I may cease to be
To Homer
The Eve of St. Agnes
Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art
La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad
Sonnet to Sleep
Ode to Psyche
Ode to a Nightingale
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ode on Melancholy
Ode on Indolence
Lamia
To Autumn
The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream
LETTERS
To Benjamin Bailey (Nov. 22, 1817)
To George and Thomas Keats (Dec. 21, 27 [?], 1817)
To John Hamilton Reynolds (Feb. 3, 1818)
To John Taylor (Feb. 27, 1818)
To John Hamilton Reynolds (May 3, 1818)
To Richard Woodhouse (Oct. 27, 1818)
To George and Georgiana Keats (Feb. 14-May 3, 1819)
To Fanny Brawne (July 25, 1819)
To Percy Bysshe Shelley (Aug. 16, 1820)
To Charles Brown (Nov. 30, 1820)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)
Introduction to Frankenstein
Transformation
Romantic Lyric Poets
Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825)
The Rights of Woman
To a Little Invisible Being Who Is Expected Soon to Become Visible
Life
Charlotte Smith (1749-1806)
Written at the Close of Spring
To Sleep
To Night
William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850)
To the River Itchin, near Winton
Languid, and sad, and slow
Joanna Baillie (1762-1851)
Up! quit thy bower
Song: Woo'd and married and a'
Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864)
Mother, I cannot mind my wheel
Rose Aylmer
The Three Roses
Past ruined Ilion
Dirce
Twenty years hence
Well I remember how you smiled
Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
Believe me, if all those endearing young charms
The harp that once through Tara's halls
The time I've lost in wooing
John Clare (1793-1864)
Mouse's Nest
I Am
Clock a Clay
Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835)
England's Dead
The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England
Casabianca
George Darley (1795-1846)
The Phoenix
It is not Beauty I demand
The Mermaidens' Vesper Hymn
Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849)
Song ("How many times do I love thee, dear?")
Song ("Old Adam, the carrion crow")
The Phantom Wooer
The Victorian Age (1830-1901)
. . .
Preface to the Sixth Edition
This anthology is designed for the indispensable
courses that introduce students to the unparalleled excellence
and variety of English literature. Its criteria remain those announced
in the original edition:
- that the works selected make possible
a study in depth of the achievements by the major writers in
prose and verse, in the context of the chief literary types
and traditions of each age;
- that these works be so far as feasible
complete, and also abundant enough to allow instructors to choose
from the total those that each one prefers to teach;
- that the student be provided the most
reliable texts available, edited so as to expedite understanding,
in a format inviting to the eye;
- that introductions, glosses, and other
informative materials be adequate to free the student from dependence
on reference books, so that the anthology may be read anywhere--in
the student's room, in a coffee lounge, on a bus, or under a
tree;
- that each editor, while subject to agreed-upon
guidelines, be allowed to keep his or her distinctive voice;
- that each volume, in size and weight,
be comfortably portable, for if students won't carry the book
to class, lectures are lamed and discussions made profitless.
A vital literary culture, however, is always
on the move. Our policy has therefore been to provide periodic
revisions that will take advantage of newly recovered or better-edited
texts, stay in touch with scholarly discoveries and the altering
interests of readers, and keep the anthology within the mainstream
of contemporary critical and intellectual concerns. In preparing
this sixth edition, we continue to benefit from the steady flow
of voluntary corrections and suggestions proposed by students,
as well as teachers, who view the anthology with a loyal but critical
eye. And we have again solicited and received detailed information
on the works actually assigned, proposals for deletions and additions,
and suggestions for improving the editorial matter, from over
150 reviewers from around the world, almost all of them teachers
who use the book in a course. In its evolution, then, The Norton
Anthology of English Literature has been the product of an
ongoing collaboration among its editors, teachers, and students.
it is sometimes claimed that the editors of the anthology simply
reproduce, or even help establish, the traditional "canon"
of English literature. The facts are, however, that the writers
and works in this collection have been selected, and then winnowed,
by a running consensus of its users, and that the continuing desirability
of these texts is attested by the number of teachers who choose
to assign them, year after year, to their students.
This anthology had it genesis in a course
that was devised and taught at Cornell University by two of its
editors, M. H. Abrams and David Daiches. One of its continuing
strengths is that both the first generation of editors and the
younger group that was added while the fifth edition was being
prepared have had long experience in teaching introductory courses
in English literature. Each revised edition therefore benefits
from the editors' familiarity with works that stand the test of
classroom use. For the present edition, we have reconsidered and
revised all the earlier introductions and notes, and totally rewritten
some of them. Some texts, which our canvass of teachers showed
to be assigned infrequently or not at all, have been replaced
by others more in demand.
A cardinal innovation in this sixth edition
is the use of a larger trim size that make for a more readable
page and allows the volume, even in the middle section, [xxxv
/ xxxvi] and stay flat. Another advantage of this altered format
is that it makes possible a number of added texts, without requiring
more pages or affecting the portability of each volume. Some of
these additions are in response to changing interests of teachers.
For example, we have continued to increase the number of women
writers, as well as to enlarge the selections by some of the women
included in earlier editions. There are now forty female authors
represented in the two volumes. Texts that have been added include
Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Virginia Woolf's A Room of
One's Own, both in their entirety. Also, the inclusion of
works by Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer of prose fiction,
and Fleur Adcock, the New Zealand poet, extends the geographical
reach of the anthology, so that with this edition it reflects
even more the international nature of literature in English.
Another type of added material consists
of writings especially useful for teachers who present literary
texts in their intellectual, political, and cultural contexts;
this type includes a selection from Sir Walter Raleigh's Discovery
of the large, rich, and beautiful Empire of Guiana and Thomas
Hariot's observations about the native Americans in his Brief
and True Report of the Newfound Land of Virginia; Francis
Bacon's Of Plantations; pungent pieces from radical pamphleteers
of the seventeenth-century Commonwealth, Gerard Winstanley and
Abiezer Coppe; and writings by Coventry Patmore and Harriet Martineau
in the Victorian section "The Woman Question."
It should be stressed that the expanded
range of concerns and the diversity of critical viewpoints that
such innovations make possible have not been achieved by cutting
the space consigned to the more traditional authors. In fact,
the new format has made it possible to make substantial additions
to some of these authors, including Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson,
Scott, and Byron.
The anthology fully represents English
poetry in its major writers, forms, and genres. it also includes
enough plays to provide a comprehensive overview of the evolution
of English drama. There are twelve plays in volume 1, ranging
from three medieval dramas to Congreve's Way of the World;
notable among them is Shakespeare's King Lear, restored
in the sixth edition in response to widespread demand. There are
seven plays in volume 2, ranging from Byron's closet drama Manfred
to contemporary works by Beckett, Pinter, and Stoppard. The greatest
challenge, of course, with the space available in a general anthology,
is to represent adequately the genre of prose fiction. Our solution
has been to make available texts that show the development of
narrative techniques and style, from Sidney's Arcadia and
Lyly's Euphues through Swift's Gulliver's Travels
and Johnson's Rasselas to Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans
Wake, and to include also a great number and variety of complete
short works of prose fiction from Mary Shelley on, as well as
such longer works as Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Joyce's
The Dead. To all these texts the altered format has now
made it possible to add Sir Walter Scott's remarkable tale The
Two Drovers, as well as short stories by Katherine Mansfield
and Nadine Gordimer and a largely self-contained section from
book I of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss.
With this sixth edition, we also inaugurate
a set of volumes, the Norton Anthology Editions, that make it
possible to obtain inexpensively the full-length novels most in
demand as supplements to volume 2 of the anthology. Our questionnaires
showed these novels to be Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice,
Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte's Jane
Eyre, and Charles Dickens' Hard Times. Each Norton
Anthology Edition includes the text, footnotes, and bibliography
of the Norton Critical Edition of the novel, together with a short
introduction by an editor of The Norton Anthology of English
Literature, and is designed to match the anthology proper.
Information for ordering the Norton Anthology Editions may be
obtained from the publisher.
It may be helpful to teachers familiar
with previous editions of this anthology to list the texts that
have been added to the present edition. . . . .
. . . .
The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century.
The principal addition is the entire text, especially edited for
the anthology by Joanna Lipking, of Oroonoko, written by
Aphra Behn, the first professional woman of letters, and remarkable
for its early representation of a plantation in the new sugar
colony of Surinam and for its choice, as its larger-than-life
tragic hero, of a black male slave. In the texts of this period,
the section from Samuel Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare
on King Lear has been added to the earlier section on Henry
IV, so that we have Johnson's comments on both the Shakespeare
plays in the anthology.
The Romantic Period. A major addition
is nine of Lord Byron's incomparable letters and one significant
journal entry; also, that poet's On this day I complete my
thirty sixth year has been added to his poems. The selections
from Sir Walter Scott have been enlarged by his fine short story
The Two Drovers, as well as by two new poems. To the section
"Romantic Lyric Poets" have been added Anna Laetitia
Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, William Lisle Bowles, Joanna Baillie,
and Felicia Dorothea Hemans.
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