The Romantic Imagination [antikvár]

PREFACE This book contains the lectures which I gave at Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the happy months of 1948-1949, when I was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. I have thought it right to publish them as they were delivered and not to transform them. The book will probably suffer from the circumstances of its origin and show certain traits which are undesirable in the printed page but inevitable to lecturing, especially when the audience does not always consist of the same people and each lecture has to be complete in itself. I must also apologize for speaking on a subject in which I am in no sense an expert or even a scholar. But the subject seemed to me to have been unjustly treated in recent years, and the welcome given to my handling of it has comforted me in my choice. Since the material presented is essentially "popular," I have given hardly any references other than what is necessary for identifying important texts. C.M.B. Cambridge, Massachusetts March loth, 1949