Eleanor Cook is Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is the author, most recently, of Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens.

"This brilliantly written work is authentic literary criticism: sharp, perceptive, learned, original, individual, and life-enhancing. The scholarship is both astonishing and in itself a mode of wit; its handling is exquisite. The book establishes Cook as a first-rate critic."—Harold Bloom, Yale University.

• Foreword; Introduction; Part I. Empire, War, Nation: 1. Eliot, Keynes, and Empire: The Waste Land; 2. Schemes against coercion: Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Bishop, and others; 3. Fables of war in Elizabeth Bishop; 4. Faulkner, typology and black history in Go Down, Moses; 5. A seeing and unseeing in the eye: Canadian literature and the sense of place; Part II. Culture and the Uses of memory: Allusion: 6. Questions of allusion; 7. The language of scripture in Wordsworth's Prelude; 8. The senses of Eliot's salvages; 9. Wallace Stevens and the King James bible; 10. Birds in paradise: revisions of a topos in Milton, Keats, Whitman, Stevens, and Ammons; Part III. Poetry at Play: 11. Melos versus logos, or, why doesn't God sing? Some thoughts on Milton's wisdom; 12. The poetics of modern punning; Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and others; 13. Riddles, charms, and fictions in Wallace Stevens; 14. The function of riddles at the present time; 15. The flying griphos: in pursuit of enigma from Aristophanes to Tournesol, with stops in Carroll, Ariosto, and Dante; Part IV. Practice: 16. Ghost rhymes and how they work; 17. Methought as dream formula in Shakespeare; Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, and others; 18. Reading a poem: on John Hollander's 'owl' 19. Teaching poetry: accurate songs, or thinking-in-poetry; Appendix; Notes; Indices; Acknowledgments.

Eleanor Cook is Professor of English at the University of Toronto. She is the author, most recently, of Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens.

"This brilliantly written work is authentic literary criticism: sharp, perceptive, learned, original, individual, and life-enhancing. The scholarship is both astonishing and in itself a mode of wit; its handling is exquisite. The book establishes Cook as a first-rate critic."—Harold Bloom, Yale University.

• Foreword; Introduction; Part I. Empire, War, Nation: 1. Eliot, Keynes, and Empire: The Waste Land; 2. Schemes against coercion: Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Bishop, and others; 3. Fables of war in Elizabeth Bishop; 4. Faulkner, typology and black history in Go Down, Moses; 5. A seeing and unseeing in the eye: Canadian literature and the sense of place; Part II. Culture and the Uses of memory: Allusion: 6. Questions of allusion; 7. The language of scripture in Wordsworth's Prelude; 8. The senses of Eliot's salvages; 9. Wallace Stevens and the King James bible; 10. Birds in paradise: revisions of a topos in Milton, Keats, Whitman, Stevens, and Ammons; Part III. Poetry at Play: 11. Melos versus logos, or, why doesn't God sing? Some thoughts on Milton's wisdom; 12. The poetics of modern punning; Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and others; 13. Riddles, charms, and fictions in Wallace Stevens; 14. The function of riddles at the present time; 15. The flying griphos: in pursuit of enigma from Aristophanes to Tournesol, with stops in Carroll, Ariosto, and Dante; Part IV. Practice: 16. Ghost rhymes and how they work; 17. Methought as dream formula in Shakespeare; Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, and others; 18. Reading a poem: on John Hollander's 'owl' 19. Teaching poetry: accurate songs, or thinking-in-poetry; Appendix; Notes; Indices; Acknowledgments.