Three Philosophical Poets

The present volume Three Philosophical Poets is composed with a few additions of six lectures read at Columbia University in February 1910 and repeated in April of the same year at the University of Wisconsin. These lectures in turn were based on a regular course which I had been giving for some time at Harvard College. Though produced under such learned auspices my book can make no great claims to learning. It contains the impressions of an amateur the appreciations of an ordinary reader concerning three great writers two of whom at least might furnish matter enough for the studies of a lifetime and actually have academies libraries and university chairs especially consecrated to their memory. I am no specialist in the study of Lucretius; I am not a Dante scholar nor a Goethe scholar. I can report no facts and propose no hypotheses about these men which are not at hand in their familiar works or in well-known commentaries upon them. My excuse for writing about them notwithstanding is merely the human excuse which every new poet has for writing about the spring. They have attracted me; they have moved me to reflection; they have revealed to me certain aspects of nature and of philosophy which I am prompted by mere sincerity to express if anybody seems interested or willing to listen. What I can offer the benevolent reader therefore is no learned investigation. It is only a piece of literary criticism together with a first broad lesson in the history of philosophy-and perhaps in philosophy itself.