Charle's T. Dougherty on The Poetry of Architecture

Paul L. Sawyer, Professor of English, Cornell University

Footnote 5, Chapter 1, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

useful recent article on this early work and its context is Charles T. Dougherty, "A Study of The Poetry of Architecture" in Studies in Ruskin, ed. Robert Rhodes and Del Ivan Janik (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982). Dougherty argues that Ruskin's praise of a neoclassical villa at Lake Como is ironic, in view of his later assaults on the mechanical regularity of this style. But there is really no irony: Ruskin cites approvingly Aristotle's description of the contemplative life, and he clearly associates the neoclassic at villa with the higher life of the mind such as he had begun to experience at Oxford.

Last modified December 2000