After an opening chapter that examines the nature of poetry itself and
analyzes its effect upon the reader, the author, in The English Poetic
Mind, moves on to his main purpose, which is to try to reveal the source
of the drive to creation in three of the greatest English poets: William
Shakespeare, John Milton, and William Wordsworth. In each he identifies
a particular kind of crisis that is the origin of the poetic impulse. In
the light of these discoveries he addresses the achievements of several
lesser poets and concludes with a chapter that, in a more general way,
tentatively offers a vision of the paths poetry might take in the
future. Introducing a duet of Charles Williams's best literary criticism
on poetry: Reason and Beauty in the Poetic Mind The English Poetic Mind
""Williams's deeper interest was in the way the nature of the act of
poetic creation could be grasped from the reading of the poems
themselves and the means by which the artists reached into and spoke
from the hidden places of their imaginative power. . . . [These two
books] will enable us to re-appraise, or perhaps encounter for the
first time, the distinctive qualities of Charles Williams's approach to
the art that was at the centre of his own creative life, poetry."" Brian
Horne, from his new 2007 foreword Author and scholar Charles Williams
(1886-1945) joined, in 1908, the staff of the Oxford University Press,
the publishing house in which he worked for the rest of his life.
Throughout these years, poetry, novels, plays, biographies, history,
literary criticism, and theology poured from his pen. At the beginning
of the Second World War the publishing house was evacuated to Oxford
where, in addition to his own writing and his editorial work for the
Press, he taught in the University.
