Charles Williams

Reason and Beauty in the Poetic Mind Charles Williams

REASON AND BEAUTY IN THE POETIC MIND REASON AND BEAUTY IN THE POETIC MIND BY CHARLES WILLIAMS OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON 1933 PREFACE THE four corners of this book lie at the following points i the use of the word Reason by Words worth in the Prelude ii the abandonment of the in tellect 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 Shake speare in the tragedies. Add to these the four middle points of i the definition of Beauty by Marlowe in Tamburlaine ii the imagination jof 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 and the ground plan will be sufficiently marked. The studies are meant as literary, and not as either philosophical or aesthetic criticism. They do not attempt to consider what the poets ought to do, only what they have done, and that from the special point of v