Reason and Beauty (eBook)

"Reason and Beauty" is a work of literary criticism by British poet, novelist, theologian and literary critic, Charles Walter Williams. Williams was a prominent member of the Inklings, an informal literary discussion group associated with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien at the University of Oxford. He gives his motives for writing as follows, "The four corners of this book lie at the following points (i) the use of the word Reason by Wordsworth in the Prelude; (ii) the abandonment of the intellect 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 Shakespeare in the tragedies. Add to these the four middle points of (i) the definition of Beauty by Marlowe in Tamburlaine; (ii) the imagination of 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 view of their explicit use of those two words, or of their implicit attention to them. The book is therefore but an exploration of the content of certain places of poetry, in an order suggested by the relative richness of that content…"