Speaking of Beauty

Writing about his newest book, Denis Donoghue says, "I do not offer to say why Jennifer Lopez and Brad Pitt are beautiful, or what cultural axioms are at work in the common agreement that they are. Instead I think of beauty as a value—like its companions, the true and the good—and I ponder the ‘words of tribute’ that are devoted to it." Here one of the foremost living critics of the English language, Denis Donoghue, examines instances of beauty and the language that beauty inspires.

An appreciative and wide-ranging reader, Donoghue discusses Kant, Schiller, Keats, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Ruskin, Henry James, Proust, Yeats, Housman, Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and many more. He considers some of the main theories of beauty and their terms of reference and appreciation. And he examines the relation of beauty to form: form as found in landscape, persons, poems, paintings, and musical phrases; and form as in the difficult question of beauty and its wild neighbor, the sublime. Writing with his customary elegance and lucidity, Donoghue tells us that beauty is a topic that has once again become interesting and even fashionable, and in this book he shows how it can be discussed with intelligence and decency.