Excerpt from The Collected Poems of Roden Noel The hon. Roden noel, as a poet, has never yet received the attention he deserves. This is not altogether the fault of the English public. Mr. Noel's poems are not exactly such as he who runs may read. To be appreciated they require patient study, not only because their thought is Often abstruse, but also because their expression is not unfrequently perplexing. Indeed, no other poet of our age, with the exception of Mr. Robert Browning, has added so much of verbal and rhythmical difficulty to the difficulties of pregnant meaning and bold speculation. Mr. Noel is what Goethe would have called an incommensurable man; and his work cannot be measured by any common standard or sounded by any average plummet. It is probable that his poems will not receive due recognition until a Noel Society has been founded. By this I mean again to place him in the same rank as Mr. Browning, who waited for his popularity until a band of students were enrolled to dedicate their time and talents to the explora tion of his labyrinths of thought. If this happens in the case of Mr. Noel, people will discover that an impassioned singer, a philosopher of marked originality, a tender-hearted Christian, and a democrat in the noblest sense of the term, has been appealing to them in words of wayward beauty and varied melody during more than a quarter of a century, almost unheeded. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.