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"The four corners of this book like at the following points (i) the use of the word Reason by Wordsworth in the Prelude ; (ii) the abandonment of the intellect by Keats in the Nightingale and the Urn ; (iii) the emphasis laid on Reason by Milton in Paradise Lost ; (iv) the schism in Reason studied by Shakespeare in the tragedies. Add to these four middle points of (i) the definition of Beauty by Marlowe in Tamburlaine ; (ii) the imagination of it by Keats in the same two odes ; (iii) the identification of it with Reason in Paradise Lost ; (iv) the humanization of it in the women of Troilus and Othello and the later plays ..."--Preface.

Implication, Readers' Resources, and Thomas Gray's Pindaric Odes presents an account of "the Poets' Secret," the quite belated, historically recent, discovery by scholars and critics of something many poets have recognized and employed for ages: the sense expressed by allusively parallel parts within a text--thus expressed intratextually rather than only intertextually. Inferential perception of the implicit sense produced logically and linguistically--by enthymemes, implicatures, and other intratextual features, as well as intertextual ones--can be indispensable for readers' comprehension of literary as well as other texts, especially their difficult passages. Implication, Readers' Resources, and Thomas Gray's Pindaric Odes addresses these elusive matters as they have historically been posed by Thomas Gray's Pindaric odes of 1757, and mainly the first of them, "The Progress of Poesy," a poem that readers have more or less knowledgeably struggled to understand from the outset. The process of disclosing that ode's sense can be aided by new further reference to Paradise Lost, in the context of Gray's largely unpublished Commonplace Book, with its extensive, little-studied, and very pertinent use of Plato and Locke.

A personal friend of T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Christopher Fry, and C.S. Lewis, to mention only a few, Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886-1945) was a self-educated, somewhat scholarly, rather ugly-faced Londoner with a Cockney accent. As a married man with the usual economic difficulties that disturb family life, he was forced to supplement his income as an editor for Oxford University Press by lecturing, tutoring, and writing. In a comparatively short life time he produced more than fifty works, several published posthumously, plus a considerable number of articles, book reviews, and verses for British and Irish periodicals. The annotated bibliography at the end of this study gives a general indication of the scope and value of this literary output. Since the death of Charles Williams, something like a cult has grown up about his name, not only in Anglican literary circles in England but also in various university and church circles in America. The reasons for this are not always obvious, but one fact appears to be certain: the cult is usually concerned with Williams, the philosopher, or Williams, the theologian, or Williams, the novelist. T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, and C.S. Lewis, for example, have discussed briefly one or all three of these facets of Williams' literary personality, and the latter two have acknowledged a certain literary indebtedness to him. As yet, however, few members of the cult recognize Williams as a dramatist, poet, literary critic and theorist, historian and biographer, and editor. Moreover, with the exception of C.S. Lewis, no member of the cult has attempted a scholarly investigation of any aspect of Williams' thought. The present study is a critical exploration of one of these avenues of thought: Williams' concept of the nature of poetry. The conclusion of this study indicates that the members of the cult should seriously consider him as a literary critic and theorist. At a time when modern criticism still exhibits the confusion inherited from its romantic background, it is no mean achievement for Williams to separate the art of poetry from the other intellectual disciplines and to claim that "poetry is a thing sui generis.--p. vii.

Excerpt from The Poetic Mind Some of the principles presented in this book are new. This I acknowledge with misgiving, for in a subject as old as poetry, where orthodox views are particularly apt to be sound, novelty is not a recommendation. Fortunately most of the principles are old, and all, I hope, rest on old foundations. Indeed I have tried to return to and develop classical views of poetry which are now somewhat out of vogue. In the main, then, old principles at most receive new interpretation and relation. A discussion, even of the present length, dealing with many aspects of the large subject of poetry, must be somewhat superficial. It would have been easier and more satisfying to completeness to apply the principles herein developed to one or two divisions of the subject. I have thought it better to carry them through several, and apply them to poetry in most of its important aspects, with the prefatory statement, however, that the treatment is introductory and provisional. Each chapter invites correction, and also demands development. Some chapters, I hope, may lead to more thorough and sagacious inquiries. The subject undertaken - the operation of the poet's mind - is fortunately not quite so broad as poetry itself. This limitation however, is counterbalanced by its lying halfway between two provinces - literature on the one hand and psychology on the other. Evidently its treatment calls for a special psychological training, to which I cannot pretend, as will no doubt sufficiently appear. The subject as a whole, so far as I know, has not been attempted by the psychologists; perhaps it is a field in which they wisely fear to tread. In what follows a literary treatment is hazarded, which may in the end, I hope, prove helpful to psychology. Evidently the subject must be approached from both sides. 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.