English Poetic Mind

The English Poetic Mind was published by Oxford's Clarendon Press in 1932, the first of Charles Williams's major works of literary criticism. Williams was then a working editor at Oxford University Press in London, a self-taught reader of poetry who had come to the university's imprint without a degree and had written novels, poems, and a study of Christian love before turning to this survey. The book belongs to the years when he was developing the habit of mind that would later mark his theology of romantic love and his friendship with C. S. Lewis and the Inklings: a conviction that poetry is a form of knowledge, and that the great English poets can be read as a long argument about what it means to be a creature who desires, doubts, and is somehow redeemed.

The book moves through a sequence of poets, among them Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Milton, Keats, and Browning, treating each less as a figure in a literary period than as a particular answer to a single question: how does a poet hold together delight in the world with the experience of its disorder and loss? Williams reads each poet through what he calls the poet's central "experience," the habitual pattern of feeling out of which the verse grows, and he is interested in how that pattern either resolves into a kind of affirmation or breaks against its own limits. His method is close attention to the movement of lines rather than the assembly of biography or influence, and his prose is dense, allusive, and aphoristic. The recurring theme is what he elsewhere names the affirmation of images: the claim that the beauty of created things, loved truthfully, is a path toward God rather than a distraction from him, though the path must pass through the testing of that love by suffering and illusion.

The book has stayed in print and in conversation mainly because it shows Williams's theology at work in the medium where he was most at home. Readers who know his later writing, He Came Down from Heaven and The Figure of Beatrice, will find the seeds of those arguments here, tied to specific poems and not stated abstractly. It also remains a distinctive example of criticism that treats imaginative literature as spiritually serious without turning it into doctrine.

Who should read this: readers who already love English poetry and want a companion who takes its religious seriousness for granted, as well as anyone tracing the roots of Williams's thought and the Inklings' shared outlook. It is not an introduction to the poets named, and it will frustrate those who want plain exposition, historical context, or a modern critical apparatus; Williams assumes the poems are familiar and expects the reader to keep pace with his compressed, sometimes oblique style.