THE translations given in this volume, with the exception of the stormscene from Tolstoy in the First Lecture, are my own. The reader will please bear in mind that these Lectures, printed here exactly as delivered, were written with a view to addressing the ear as well as the eye, otherwise the book would have been entirely different from what it now is. When delivering the Sixth Lecture, I read extracts from Tolstoy’s “My Religion” and “What to Do,” illustrating every position of his I there commend; but for reasons it is needless to state, I omit them in the book. I can only hope that the reader will all the more readily go to the books themselves.

1889. P. GRAFTON, MASS., 1 July, 1889.

Türk-Alman Göçmen Edebiyatının günümüz popüler yazarlarından biri olan Safiye Can, bugüne kadar yayınladığı üç şiir kitabının yanı sıra öykü ve çeviri eserleriyle ön plana çıkmıştır. Yaklaşık altmış beş yıllık göç tarihinin toplumsal, siyasal, kültürel değişim ve gelişimini harmanlayarak şiirlerine yansıtan Can, aşk, yalnızlık, memleket hasreti gibi konuları farklı motif ve söz sanatlarıyla işleyerek okura sunmuş, bugüne kadar almış olduğu edebiyat ödülleri ve kendisiyle ilgili medyada yer alan pek çok haber ve söyleşi onun edebi zenginliği ve derinliğini gözler önüne sermiştir. Somut şiirlerden kolaj şiirlere, iki mısralık kısa şiirlerden uzun destansı şiirlere kadar neredeyse her türde usta işi şiirler kaleme almıştır. Şiirleri bazen içinizi ısıtır, bazen soğuk bir titreme yaratır. Bazen mutlu gözlerle gökyüzüne baktırır, bazen hüzünlendirir. Ama her durumda, umuda kırpılan bir göz, aşka uzanan bir el imgesi karşılar sizi her şiirinde!

The literary history, as I conceive it, is an account of one strand, so to speak, in a very complex tissue: it is connected with the intellectual and social development; it represents movements of thought which may sometimes check and be sometimes propitious to the existing forms of art; it is the utterance of a class which may represent, or fail to represent, the main national movement; it is affected more or less directly by all manner of religious, political, social, and economical changes; and it is dependent upon the occurrence of individual genius for which we cannot even profess to account. I propose to take the history of English literature in the eighteenth century. I do not aim at originality: I take for granted the ordinary critical judgments upon the great writers of whom so much has been said by judges certainly more competent than myself, and shall recall the same facts both of ordinary history and of the history of thought. What I hope is, that by bringing familiar facts together I may be able to bring out the nature of the connection between them; and, little as I can say that will be at all new, to illustrate one point of view, which, as I believe, it is desirable that literary histories should take into account more distinctly than they have generally done.