This volume of essays, written at various stages of Professor Hough's career, is a distinguished and wide-ranging collection of literary studies.

Preface; Acknowledgements; 1. Criticism as a humanist discipline; 2. An eighth type of ambiguity; 3. Narrative and dialogue in Jane Austen; 4. The poetry of Coleridge; 5. Coleridge and the Victorians; 6. The natural theology of In Memoriam; 7. Edgar Allan Poe; 8. W. B. Yeats: a study in poetic integration; 9. Vision and doctrine in Four Quartets; Dante and Eliot; 10. Dante and Eliot; 11. John Crowe Ransom: the poet and the critic; 12. The modernist lyric.