Table of Contents
Prelude Reading to Stay Alive-Poetic Thinking 1
Introduction The Rhetoric of Poetic Thinking 14
1 William Shakespeare and John Milton: In Every Deep, a Lower Deep 38
2 Milton: The Shakespearean Epic 83
3 Milton and William Blake: The Human Form Divine 110
4 William Wordsworth and John Keats: Something Evermore About to Be 159
5 Wordsworth: The Myth of Memory 170
6 Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron: Serpent and Eagle 180
7 Keats: They Seek No Wonder but the Human Face 297
8 Robert Browning: What in the Midst Lay but the Tower Itself? 333
9 Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Lest One Good Custom Should Corrupt the World 356
10 Walt Whitman: I Stop Somewhere Waiting for You 379
11 Robert Frost: Drink and Be Whole Again beyond Confusion 409
12 Wallace Stevens: The Hum of Thoughts Evaded in the Mind 422
13 William Butler Yeats and D. H. Lawrence: Start with the Shadow 460
14 Hart Crane: The Unknown God 500
15 Sigismund Schlomo Freud: Speculation and Wisdom 559
16 Dante/Center and Shakespeare/Circumference 577
Credits 629
Index 631