Poetry at Present

Poetry at Present is a book of critical essays by Charles Williams, published by Oxford University Press in 1930. Williams was then working at the Press in London as an editor, reviewing and reading verse by his contemporaries as part of his daily labor, and the book gathers his considered judgments on the living English poets of his day. It belongs to the early period of his career, before the novels and theological writing that later made his name, and it shows a working critic taking the measure of a crowded and unsettled poetic scene in the years after the First World War.

The book proceeds poet by poet, giving each a short, concentrated assessment rather than a survey of movements. Williams writes about figures such as Hardy, Bridges, Kipling, Yeats, de la Mare, Housman, Eliot and Edith Sitwell, among others, and he is willing to praise and to withhold praise in the same paragraph. His method is to ask what each poet is actually doing with language, rhythm and subject, and where the work succeeds on its own terms. Throughout, his criticism is marked by a conviction that poetry is a serious form of attention to experience, not decoration or mere self-expression, and that a poem's worth shows in the exactness with which it holds together feeling and form. Readers familiar with his later work will recognize in these essays the habits of mind that he later turned toward romantic theology: a close regard for the particular, and a refusal to treat the ordinary matter of human life as separate from what it might mean.

The book has endured mainly as a document of its moment and as an early view of Williams himself. It preserves a contemporary reading of poets who were still being sorted into reputation, and it shows how a reader of strong Christian imagination approached secular poetry without either baptizing it or dismissing it. For those studying Williams's development, it supplies the critical groundwork on which his later studies of Milton, Dante and the English poetic tradition were built.

Who should read this: Readers interested in Charles Williams's formation as a critic, and those who want a thoughtful insider's account of English poetry between the wars, will find it rewarding. It is a book of literary criticism, not a work of devotion or theology, so it is not for anyone seeking spiritual instruction or a introduction to the Inklings' better-known fiction. Casual readers without some acquaintance with the poets discussed may find it thin going.