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.
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Famous quotes containing the word works:
“The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.”
—Freya Stark (b. 1893–1993)