By G. Wilson Knight
Professor Wilson Knight is widely known for his interpretative paintings on Shakespeare, Byron and different classics. He has additionally at times released articles on smooth literature. those are the following accumulated, with the addition of latest material.
Poets who've had little analytic cognizance lately resembling Tennyson, Masefield and Brooke, are proven, within the demeanour to which we've grown accustomed in Wilson Knight's reviews, to carry a measurement of which means hitherto overlooked or misunderstood. Homage is paid to John Cowper Powys as one of many finest seers of our, or any, age. A complete evaluation of the paintings of Francis Berry claims to set up him as our ideal dwelling poet.
Professor Knight's new quantity makes an uncompromising problem. He urges, and is going some distance to end up, that smooth literary feedback has didn't make touch with the richer meanings of latest literature. He stresses the relation among such acclaimed poets as Yeats and Eliot and the spiritualistic activities of at the present time, and argues that powers to which our ecclesiastical and educational traditions were blind are crying for popularity, not just via our major poets but additionally in pop track. Professor Knight regards youth-revolts as symptoms of a fit dissatisfaction with an irreligious and directionless tradition, and believes that our wish lies within the overlooked powers urgent for popularity.
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Additional info for Neglected Powers: Essays on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature
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This is not new. It has been going on, with an increasing threat, for cen turies. No doubt the Epic of Gilgamish was coldly received by the Sumerian intelligentsia. Criticism tears at the throat of literature. Since I am here concerned with the literary product rather than the process of its composition, we need not say anything much of 'inspiration'. That most, if not all, great writers have been aware of an inspiratory power needs no argument. The ancients talked of the Muse, or Muses; the word 'genius' itself indicates, according z6 Poetry and Magic to the dictionary, a 'tutelary spirit'.
Angels were regularly depicted, and in pageantry performed, by boys, and there was the deeply purposeful ritual of the Boy Bishop (discussed in The Golden Labyrinth, 3 0). The theme is widespread: in Vergil, as noted in a peculiarly valuable passage in my brother W. F. , Penguin, 1 966, IV. q6); in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare; in the life and work, especially the 'Thyrza' poems and those to Loukas, of Byron (Lord Byron's Marriage, 3 0-5 , 2 1 7-1 9); in Tennyson, Wilde, T. E. Lawrence.
Literary interpretation assists in resolving this oppo sition, helping us to think what we have imaginatively experienced. 1 Modern science, starting from a praiseworthy attempt to face facts, soon itself became an orthodoxy rejecting anything that disturbed its system and dis regarding such esoteric thinking as that of Goethe, Blake, and Rudolf Steiner. The chaos foreseen by Alexander Pope at the conclusion of The Dunciad is now abundantly evident. Physics has dissolved objects to abstractions, philosophy replaces concepts by linguistics, theology fights a rearguard action while attempting to embrace its pursuers.