Romantic Confusions of the Good: Beauty as Truth, Truth Beauty

Paying special attention to the Romantic poets from Wordworth and Coleridge down to Pound and Eliot, Marion Montgomgery explores the disorientation of image and methaphor for reality. The book focuses on the virtues and limits of the intuitive intellect as they are explicated by Thomas Aquinas in relation to rational intellect, and the Romantic poet’s dependence upon the intuitive. Montgomery takes the position that, because of a disassociation of the intuitive and rational modes of intellectual action, two species of romanticism centering in presumptuous autonomy emerge: that of the poet and that of the scientist.