This book argues that in the portraying of paradise, the Age of Milton describes a shift from static pastoral enclaves to images of joyful career and idealized process. Felicity comes to be inseparable from openness and change.

This book argues that it was through his dialogue with the pastoral and elegiac traditions in "Lycidas" that Milton first came face to face with the frustrations and pressures which were to change the future course of his life.

This study of Dryden's dualities suggests that the double structures we find in his work go deeper than the superficial dialectic of his language. The liveliest parts of Dryden's works are those where divisions become most extreme, where he can exploit their poetic possibilities.

George Moore's correspondence with "Gabriell," "the Mysterious Countess."

This is a study of early critical evaluations of Walter Pater's writings by critics who had some literary prominence at the time and who best represent the spirit of the Victorian age in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century; it provides an idea of Pater's reputation before he became inseparable linked with aestheticism.

The notion that a ceiling, or a wall fresco, or a while room may illustrate and develop a coherent intellectual idea may appear unfamiliar to students of literature, this book argues that the work of the learned and harmonious Raphael that struck the deepest response in Milton as a humanist and religious poet.

A collection of essays addressing Robert Frost's influence on other poets, including Theodore Roethke, James Dickey, Richard Wilbur, James Wright and Galway Kinnell.

Browning's "Sordello" has often been regarded as teh ultimate difficult poem, at least until its twentieth-century successors. It is also usually seen as an anomalous freak of literary history. Browning's early masterwork can be understood best, however, as a mature extension of the poetics of its time, as well as a late-Romantic attempt to write an epical work which must be read both willfully and imaginatively.

This book focuses on the human and artistic dimensions of the contacts between Charles Olson and Edward Dahlberg, two of the most interesting figures of modern American letters.