Works
Beach was the author of a number of works of poetry, literary criticism, and fiction. He was one of the first academic scholars to work on literary figures such as Henry James (The Method of Henry James (1918)), George Meredith (The Comic Spirit in Meredith (1911)), and Thomas Hardy. Allen Tate called his book on Henry James "a critical masterpiece, as its insights have not been replaced or improved upon to any great extent by later critics." Beach was also an authority on nineteenth-century literature, and especially Romantic poetry. He published his magnum opus, (The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry) in 1936. Beach's The Making of the Auden Canon (1957) was a study of how W. H. Auden revised his earlier-published poems as his view of the world changed. His other books include The Outlook for American Prose (1926), American Fiction: 1920-1040 (1941), and Obsessive Images: Symbolism in Poetry of the 1930s and 1940s (1960).
Beach also brought out three volumes of his own poetry--Sonnets of the Head and Heart (1903), Beginning With Plato (1944), and Involuntary Witness (1950)--as well as one novel--Glass Mountain (1930)--and a book of short stories--Meek Americans (1925). His letters and papers are housed in the Library of Congress and at the University of Minnesota library.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Warren Beach
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“Every man is in a state of conflict, owing to his attempt to reconcile himself and his relationship with life to his conception of harmony. This conflict makes his soul a battlefield, where the forces that wish this reconciliation fight those that do not and reject the alternative solutions they offer. Works of art are attempts to fight out this conflict in the imaginative world.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast
crowned him with glory and honor.
Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands;”
—Bible: Hebrew Psalm VIII (l. VIII, 5–6)