With characteristic precision, authority, and grace, Vendler helps readers to appreciate the conception and practice of poetry as she explores four poets and their first "perfect" works. 4 halftones.

Milton's skill in constructing poems whose structure is determined, not by rule or precedent, but by the thought to be expressed, is one of his chief accomplishments as a creative artist. Professor Condee analyzes seventeen of Milton's poems, both early and late, well and badly organized, in order to trace the poet's developing ability to create increasingly complex poetic structures. Three aspects of Milton's use of poetic structure are stressed: the relation of the parts to the whole and parts to parts, his ability to unite actual events with the poetic situation, and his use and variation of literary tradition to establish the desired structural unity.

Whether O.B. Hardison Jr. (1929-1990) wrote about government's responsibility to the arts and humanities, film adaptations of Shakespeare's play, Dadaist poetry, or modern and postmodern design and architecture, his chosen form was the essay. Showcasing Hardison's mastery of the essay's power to instruct, persuade, and provoke, the twenty-five selections in this volume range from his earliest works to those completed but still unpublished at the time of his death. As Arthur F. Kinney notes in his preface, they all bear hallmarks of Hardison's style: his intensity and acuity of thought, his concreteness, his grounding of the present and future in the past, his easy melding of analytic and expository conventions, and his intercultural perspective.