Helen Gardner

John Milton, Thomas Carew, Sir William Davenant, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Sir Walter Ralegh, Robert Southwell, John Donne, Richard Crashaw form part of the 17th century poets who became known as metaphysical. In this anthology Dame Helen Gardner has collected together those poets who although never self consciously a school, did possess in common certain features of argument and powerful persuasion.

The Metaphysical Poets

Richard G. Tansey

Horst de la Croix

Fred S. Kleiner

Fred Kleiner

Gardner's Art Through the Ages, Renaissance and Modern Art

Understanding the Arts

The Composition of Four Quartets

Miss Gardner's book is a collection of lectures. It is not about Milton's rhetoric or imagery, but about his whole high argument considered as an imaginative structure. What is its shape? how does it cohere? what is the relationship, within Milton's universe, of the cosmic theme to the human theme? -- these are her topics. In all her discussions Miss Gardner's special strength lies in her power to wing a 'middle flight' between two other opposites: the historical and the 'absolute' kinds of criticism; the one treating a poem wholly as a product of its age, and the other treating it as an aesthetic object in vacuo. Miss Gardner can look at Paradise Lost with an innocent eye and savour it with a taste uncorrupted by literary prejudice; but her appreciation is enriched and authenticated by her profound knowledge of the seventeenth century mind. She knows how much common ground Milton shared with his readers; how far he could expect them to suspend their disbelief; how much they would take for granted as scriptural and therefore true, and how much they could accept as 'accommodation' or probable fiction, or even as mere epic machinery and amplification. - Basil Willey.

A Reading of Paradise Lost

Helen Gardner is a vigorous and eloquent champion of traditional literary values. These values have been subverted, she feels, by some of the ablest of modern academics and by prevalent tendencies in criticism and teaching today. She discusses the new schools of criticism which exalt the sometimes unintelligible theorist above the creator of the work of art, the imaginative interpreter of life, or which replace the authority of the author with that of the reader. She regrets the tendency of teachers to emphasize contemporary literature to the neglect of the great writings of the past and to teach past literature only if it can somehow be made "relevant." She reproves theater directors who distort Shakespeare's plays and who convert serious drama into happenings. And she finds that biographers of writers are so preoccupied with the inner lives of their subjects that the writings become psychological documents rather than works of the imagination. In a closing chapter, partly autobiographical, she affirms the values she has found in a life devoted to the study of literature. Even the most polemical sections of the book are courteous and good-humored. Her own lucidity, range of reference, and passionate concern for literature are in themselves powerful affirmations of her argument.

In Defence of the Imagination

John Donne

This classic edition of Donne's Divine Poems contains an extensive and invaluable critical apparatus by Helen Gardner.

The Divine Poems

The enthusiastic reception currently being given to the writings of the English mystic is accounted for in these essays outlining the scope and beauty of Donne's poetry.

Helen Gardner

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