Part one: Theory. From The history of Rasselas ; Lives of the poets, from Abraham Cowley / Samuel Johnson -- Preface to Lyrical ballads / William Wordsworth -- Biographia literaria ; On poesy or art / Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- From Nature ; The poet / Ralph Waldo Emerson -- From The poetic principle / Edgar Allan Poe -- Preface to Leaves of Grass / Walt Whitman -- The function of criticism at the present time ; The study of poetry / Matthew Arnold -- The art of fiction / Henry James -- From criticism and fiction / William Dean Howells -- From The serious artist ; Vorticism ; From How to read / Ezra Pound -- Tradition and the individual talent ; The metaphysical poets ; Religion and literature / T.S. Eliot -- From Principles of literary criticism ; From Coleridge on imagination / I.A. Richards -- On the discrimination of romanticisms / Arthur O. Lovejoy -- Humanism: An essay at definition / Irving Babbit -- Archetypal patterns in tragic poetry / Maud Bodkin --^
Poetry: A note on ontology / John Crowe Ransom -- The historical interpretation of literature / Edmund Wilson -- Literature as equipment for living / Kenneth Burke -- The intentional fallacy / W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley -- From The analysis of the literary work of art / Rene Wellek -- Preface to Herman Melville ; Romance, the folk imagination, and myth criticism / Richard Chase -- Toward a more adequate criticism of poetic structure / Ronald S. Crane -- Anagogic phase: Symbol as monad / Northrop Frye -- Dissociation of sensibility / Frank Kermode -- Tragic perspectives: A sequence of queries / John Gassner -- The necessary stylist: A new critical revision / Mark Spilka -- The function of criticism today -- Part two: Practice. Origins. Donne and love poetry in the seventeenth century / C.S. Lewis -- Newton''s rainbow and the poet''s / M.H. Abrams -- Edgar Allan Poe / William Carlos Williams -- Our cousin, Mr. Poe / Allen Tate --^
Henry James, the master / Ford Madox Ford -- The ghost of Henry James: Revised, with a postscript / Saul Rosenzweig -- Ideas and values. Hamlet: The psycho-analytical solution / Ernest Jones -- May games and metamorphoses on a midsummer night / C.L. Barber -- English poets: The period of primitive accumulation / Christopher Caudwell -- Nathaniel Hawthorne and The scarlet letter -- The case against the past / R.W.B. Lewis -- The vision of evil / F.O. Matthiessen -- Come back to the raft ag''in, Huck honey! / Leslie Fiedler -- The New England conscience, Henry James, and Ambassador Strether / Austin Warren -- The cult of experience in American writing / Philip Rahv -- Mr. Eliot and Lawrence / F.R. Leavis -- Reality in America / Lionel Trilling -- Boys'' weeklies / George Orwell -- Orwell: History as nightmare / Irving Howe -- Form. From Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: The analogy of action / Francis Fergusson -- A note on meter / Arnold Stein --^
Symbolic action in a poem by Keats / Kenneth Burke -- Keat''s Sylvan historian: History without footnotes / Cleanth Brooks -- Maule''s curse, or Hawthorne and the problem of allegory / Yvor Winters -- Toward an American epic / Roy Harvey Pearce -- Alice in wonderland: The child as Swain / William Empson -- The later poetry of W.B. Yeats / R.P. Blackmur -- About one of Marianne Moore''s poems / Wallace Stevens.
