The Poetic Image

by Cecil Day-Lewis

Book Overview

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0224601423
• Release Date: January 1947
• Publisher: Cape
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.

Customer Reviews

On the wings of Poesy

This is a very rich book of poetic criticism. It focuses on the role of the 'image' in poetry. Much of it focuses on a reading of English Poetry with great emphasis given to the Romantic Period. Lewis understands the importance of Poetry's transformative emotional power, and this brings him close to the Romantics. He too considers questions such as the way the Imagery of a Poem brings it to a kind of completeness and harmony. He provides a great number of beautiful poetic passages, and I found the reading of them a central pleasure of the book. Among his insights are one in which he citing Goethe contrasts the method of writing in which one has a universal one wishes to teach and embodies it in a particular, and one in which the focus on the particular leads to the emergence of the universal from within. It is the latter method which is according to Lewis that of genuine and deeper poetry. Here there is something similar to Coleridge's elaboration of the difference between mechanical 'Fancy' and the truer poetic method which comes through organic 'Imagination'. An excellent work truly.