And it is very difficult at the present time for the ordinary student of poetry to tell you just how much has been written upon any particular subject by the best English poets.
Now you will recognize some difficulties in the way of a lecturer in attempting to make classifications of English poetry after the same manner that Japanese classification can be made of Japanese poetry.

One must read enormously merely to obtain one's materials, and even then the result is not to be thought of as exhaustive.

I am going to try to give you a few lectures upon English poetry thus classified, but we must not expect that the lectures will be authoritatively complete.

Indeed, we have no time for lectures of so thorough a sort.

All that I can attempt will be to give you an idea of the best things that English poets have thought and expressed upon certain subjects.
You know that the old Greeks wrote a great deal of beautiful poetry about insects,--especially about musical insects, crickets, cicadas, and other insects such as those the Japanese poets have been writing about for so many hundreds of years.