World's Best Poetry, Volume 6: Fancy and Sentiment (Part 1)

This volume pulls from the full range of English-language verse to gather poems that dwell in two intertwined kingdoms: the realm of fancy, where fairies dance and elves weave moonlight into thread, and the realm of sentiment, where the human heart confronts time, mortality, and wonder. Edited by Canadian poet laureate Bliss Carman, this collection draws from centuries of poets who understood that imagination is not escape but revelation, that in seeing sprites we see ourselves more clearly. The poems here move from myth and mysticism to intimate meditations on what it means to be finite creatures dreaming of the infinite. An introductory essay by literary historian Charles Francis Richardson sets the stage, situating these poems within the grand tradition of verse that refuses the divide between the seen and the unseen. For readers who have ever paused at twilight and wondered what moves just beyond the periphery of vision, this collection offers language equal to that wondering.