Includes index.

Prelude: reading to stay alive, poetic thinking -- Introduction: the rhetoric of poetic thinking -- William Shakespeare and John Milton: in every deep, a lower deep -- Milton: the Shakespearean epic -- Milton and William Blake: the human form divine -- William Wordsworth and John Keats: something evermore about to be -- Wordsworth: the myth of memory -- Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron: serpent and eagle -- Keats: they seek no wonder but the human face -- Robert Browning: what in the midst lay but the tower itself? -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson: lest one good custom should corrupt the world -- Walt Whitman: I stop somewhere waiting for you -- Robert Frost: drink and be whole again beyond confusion -- Wallace Stevens: the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind -- William Butler Yeats and D. H. Lawrence: start with the shadow -- Hart Crane: the unknown God -- Sigismund Schlomo Freud: speculation and wisdom -- Dante/Center and Shakespeare/Circumference

The last book written by the most famous literary critic of his generation, on the sustaining power of poetry.