ABSTRACT
TRANSLATORS' PREFACE Two thoughtful book-notices, published in the "Westminster Gazette" last year, give the clue to much of the interest and value of Charles Baudouin's Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics. The first of these notices, a review of a translation of Benedetto Croce's The Poetry of Dante, appeared in the "Weekly Westminster Gazette" for August 12, 1922. The writer says of Dante: "To understand him, . . . we require first some clue to his symbolism and the world-view which inspires it .... Next, we require, at least in some degree, poetry of soul; conferring on us the power of sympathetic communion with the spirit of the poet. These are the essentials of the 'historico-aesthetic' understanding of the Divine Comedy; or, indeed, of any supreme work of art." The other notice, signed" E. V.," was a review of F. C. Prescott's The Poetic Mind, and was published in the " Weekly Westminster Gazette" for September 2, 1922. "To be complete," writes the reviewer, "such a book should be written, as it were, by spiritual Siamese twins, one a poet and the other a psychologist, in vital union and complete sympathy of soul. Where Professor Prescott fails he does so because of an almost inevitable limitation in such imaginative sympathy; because he doesn't really know' what it feels like to be a poet. . . . He throws a new and interesting light on many phases and peculiarities of poetic creation; yet its concrete reality escapes him still."
