Rage For Order: Critical Essyas On Nine Metaphysical Poets and Novelists

Warren, Austin

Published by University of Chicago Press, 1948

About this Item

Chicago. 1948. University of Chicago Press. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Slightly Worn Dustjacket With Some Pieces Missing. 165 pages. hardcover. Letter Signed by the Author Inside. keywords: Literary Criticism America. DESCRIPTION - Can great art-or an understanding of great art-be achieved without an agonizing spiritual search for meaning in an apparently chaotic universe? Mr. Warren thinks it cannot. Art can fail, he says, through flatness and glibness, which result when the artist has undergone no such struggle, or through obscurity and hysteria, when his technique has failed to express adequately his experience. It succeeds, he believes, only when the writer succeeds in subjecting his passion to discipline, when he orders' his rage. In this book Mr. Warren examines the work of nine metaphysical poets and novelists by these criteria. Writers as disparate as Pope and Yeats are part of the metaphysical tradition, as Mr. Warren interprets it, because they are aware of civilization's precarious foothold. Though their methods differ, Pope is able to define the civilized present' of his time with a grim realization of its flimsy façade. Yeats similarly conveys a sense of the outer world which moves by revolutions, reversals and brutalities Hawthorne and Kafka, also part of This tradition, are linked through their searchings of the human soul. Edward Taylor and George Herbert concerned themselves with an inner order and the submission of man's will to God's. In Hopkins' poetry, which presupposes a belief in another world independent of man's knowing mind,' Mr. Warren sees a continuance of this metaphysical strain. Henry James, in his attempts to describe the interrelations between the outer social world and the inner subjective one, and E. M. Forster, who strives for a complete and balanced conception of human nature, both have contributed to a fuller realization of nonmaterial values. inventory #34457 Very Good in Slightly Worn Dustjacket With Some Pieces Missing.

Seller Inventory # z34457

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Rage For Order: Critical Essyas On Nine Metaphysical Poets and Novelists
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 1948
• Binding: hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Dust Jacket Condition: Good
• Signed: Letter Signed by the Author Inside