This book is not strictly an anthology. That is a Greek word which means plucking flowers. Our object has not been to find the best poems ever written in English by Catholics and put them between two covers. It has been to see what man's life has looked like to the Catholic poets. Thus we have not started with the 8th Century and gone steadily through to the verge of the 20th. The effort has been to choose a number of subjects covering the shape of man's life, and find what Catholic poets from the 8th Century to the 20th have written on each of those subjects.
The book is in to parts: (1) The General Framework of Man's Life (The Creation and Fall of Angels and Man, The Incarnation, Passion and Redemption, The Last Judgement).
And (2) The Life of Man (The Kind of Being Man Is, the Kind of Thing Life Is, Love and Marriage, The Beauty of the World, The Pain of the World, Religion, Death, the Next Life).
There are poems on all these themes, so that the book as a whole is the Catholic poets' commentary on Life. We are not concerned with any paraphernalia of literary criticism - what this poet owed to that poet or this movement to that, or how this poet shows an advance in technique on that. Here are the poems. Our concern is what they have to say about life. It is marvelous to see how little difference a thousand years makes in that. Early or late, they are all fellow-Catholics, fellow to one another, fellow to us.