Comment by DrStormyDaniels

It takes less time than you might think to get aquatinted with older English spellings, especially if you start at the deep end with Chaucer; it’s plain sailing after. Personally I got to enjoy and prefer the absolute disregard for standard spellings, capitalisation, and punctuation, so much that I find it harder to read, e.g. Shakespeare in a modernised text. More interestingly, there’s the problem of translating or updating poetry. If the poem was written with full self-consciousness of word choice, then the meaning really is lost by “updating” it, and where the poetry is best written, the meaning will be most lost.