Lowell, Don Marquis, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ruth Comfort Mitchell,
Marjorie L.C. Pickthall, Lizette Woodworth Reese, Grantland Rice, Edwin
Arlington Robinson, Robert Haven Schauffler, Don C. Seitz, Clement
Shorter (for Dora Sigerson Shorter), Edith M. Thomas, Louis Untermeyer,
and William Butler Yeats.




PREFACE


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.