'There is no essay by C. S. Lewis on any writer that does not provoke attention and inspire awe at his energy and clarity of mind.' Claude Rawson, Yale University

• Preface Walter Hooper; 1. De Descriptione Temporum; 2. The alliterative metre; 3. What Chaucer really did to Il Filostrato; 4. The fifteenth-century Heroic line; 5. Hero and Leander; 6. Variation in Shakespeare and others; 7. Hamlet: the prince or the poem?; 8. Donne and love poetry in the seventeenth century; 9. The literary impact of the authorised version; 10. The vision of John Bunyan; 11. Addision; 12. Four-letter words; 13. A note on Jane Austen; 14. Shelley, Dryden, and Mr Eliot; 15. Sir Walter Scott; 16. William Morris; 17. Kipling's world; 18. Bluspels and flalansferes: a semantic nightmare; 19. High and low brows; 20. Metre; 21. Psycho-analysis and literary criticism; 22. The anthropological approach; Index.