A Romantic View of Poetry

A Romantic View of Poetry was first published in 1944. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Poetry is of the very essence of living. In this belief Joseph Warren Beach discusses the ways in which poet and reader create and live "a being more intense" and thereby fulfill the function of poetry. "Wherever there is life," says Beach, "there poetry is present potentially and in its rudiments . . . and poetry, as I conceive it, is the sovereign means we have of realizing the satisfaction which we take in living." Against the background of the Romantic School, he develops a pattern for the understanding of poetry that applies to all schools and to all readers. Poetry of realization and release cannot be circumscribed. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley stand here as examples of the poetic artist. And every person who responds to the work of the poet shares with him the imaginative stimulus of poetic creation. A Romantic View of Poetry consists of a series of lectures delivered by Mr. Beach at the Johns Hopkins University in 1941 on the Percy Turnball Memorial Foundation.