The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism

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The statement already quoted, that “poetry is the most highly organized form of intellectual activity,” may be taken as a specimen of the abstract style in criticism. The confus...

It is impossible to overlook the merits of scholarship and criticism exhibited by George Wyndham’s posthumous book, and it is impossible to deal with the book purely on its meri...

Mr. More is not, like Sainte-Beuve, primarily interested in psychology or in human beings; Mr. More is primarily a moralist, which is a worthy and serious thing to be. The troub...

In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equal...

I do not believe, however, that such performances will do very much to rehabilitate Greek literature or our own, unless they stimulate a desire for better translations. The seri...

This is not Spenser’s movement, but the influence of Spenser must be present. There had been no great blank verse before Marlowe; but there was the powerful presence of this gre...

It is generally conceded that Jonson failed as a tragic dramatist; and it is usually agreed that he failed because his genius was for satiric comedy and because of the weight of...

If we approach Jonson with less frozen awe of his learning, with a clearer understanding of his “rhetoric” and its applications, if we grasp the fact that the knowledge required...

Massinger was, in fact, as a comic writer, fortunate in the moment at which he wrote. His comedy is transitional; but it happens to be one of those transitions which contain som...

One feels that the form is not well chosen. The borrowed philosophy of Dante and Lucretius is perhaps not so interesting, but it injures their form less. Blake did not have that...