A Romantic View of Poetry was first published in 1944. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Poetry is of the very essence of living. In this belief Joseph Warren Beach discusses the ways in which poet and reader create and live "a being more intense" and thereby fulfill the function of poetry. "Wherever there is life," says Beach, "there poetry is present potentially and in its rudiments . . . and poetry, as I conceive it, is the sovereign means we have of realizing the satisfaction which we take in living."

Against the background of the Romantic School, he develops a pattern for the understanding of poetry that applies to all schools and to all readers. Poetry of realization and release cannot be circumscribed. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley stand here as examples of the poetic artist. And every person who responds to the work of the poet shares with him the imaginative stimulus of poetic creation.

A Romantic View of Poetry consists of a series of lectures delivered by Mr. Beach at the Johns Hopkins University in 1941 on the Percy Turnball Memorial Foundation.

Beginning with Plato was first published in 1944. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

These selected poems of Joseph Warren Beach range in time from the present year to the age of Pericles; in place from California to Shangri-La, from Paris to the Middle West; in theme from current political issues to the timeless problems of Greek philosophy; in mood from tender love to trenchant satire. In these fifty-odd poems is a rich variety—Anthony Eden and Cordell Hull, the French capital in the summer preceding the first World War, the skylines of the American West, the skylines of Minneapolis, soldier and swan maiden, and the inner life of man wherever lived. Mr. Beach can tell home truths without bitterness, and handle nostalgic emotion without sentimentality.

Making of the Auden canon was first published in 1957. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

No poet writing in English is more representative of the intellectual trends of the thirties and forties than W. H. Auden. British born, Oxford educated, American by naturalization, and now returned to Oxford to occupy the chair of poetry, he is widely regarded as the spiritual guide and keeper of the conscience of the age, at the same time that he exemplifies the gradual passage from ideological left to right so characteristic of the period. This study of Auden's poetry and revisions has far-reaching implications for an understanding not only of Auden's own writing but that of his contemporaries as well.

Considering that 1945 Collected Poetry as the Auden canon, or authorized version of the poems, Mr. Beach examines the process by which Auden selected poems to be admitted to the canon. He shows that the poet eliminated many that were at odds with his later style and thought, discreetly revised others to bring them into line, and, at the same time, left unaltered some of the pieces from his unregenerate days. Auden's system of selection and revision reflects the winding course of his thought, and, by tracing this course, Mr. Beach endeavors to penetrate the poet's diverse masks in an effort to get at the identity of t he man himself.

Obsessive Images was first published in 1960. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

As Mark Schorer comments, this is "the last, unfinished work of a distinguished, well loved critic, poet, and professor." After the death of Joseph Warren Beach, his colleague and friend William Van O'Connor, professor of English at the University of Minnesota, prepared the unfinished manuscript of this work for publication and wrote the foreword.

The work is primarily a study of certain words, phrases, and images that turn up with unusual frequency in modern American poetry, especially that of the decades of the 1930's and 1940's, and which are used in unusual senses, to carry special symbolisms, or to imply peculiar philosophical attitudes. Since the study is concerned with such recurring images and themes, many poets of distinction, in whose work they are not to be found, are left out, but Professor Beach also discusses the significance of the absence of these poets.

Students and critics will gain insight through this work into the characteristic attitudes of a generation of poets. The book is, moreover, a delight to read, reflecting, as it does, Mr. Beach's own love for the study of poetry. As Professor O'Connor points out, the tone is much more personal than that of Mr. Beach's other books.