H. Auden assembled, edited, and arranged the best of his prose writing, including the famous lectures he delivered as Oxford Professor of Poetry. The result is less a formal collection of essays than an extended and linked series of observations—on poetry, art, and the observation of life in general.The Dyer's Hand is a surprisingly personal, intimate view of the author's mind, whose central focus is poetry—Shakespearean poetry in particular—but whose province is the author's whole experience of the twentieth century.

    This is the book of a mature and individual mind and sensibility, with a deep experience of moral, social, psychological, and aesthetic values which is rare among critics." —George D. Painter"A moving and inspiring book. Moss clears away dark corners, clarifies motivations, and places the huge work within the reader's perspective. A book of great value to the scholar and the general reader." —Publishers Weekly"Remembrance of Things Past is more than a novel; it is a work in which a single person's life is transformed into a mythology, with its own pantheon of gods, its own religious rituals, and its own moral laws. A total vision, it does not rely on any system outside itself for support. It is as if Dante had set out to write the Paradiso and the Inferno utilizing only the facts of his own existence without any reference to Christianity...Other novelists describe or invent worlds. Remembrance of Things Past is an entire universe created and interpreted by Marcel Proust." — from Chapter 1Howard Moss was poetry editor of the New Yorker for almost forty years. He also wrote more than a dozen books of poetry, plays, criticism, and a book of arch parody-microbiographies of cultural figures, Instant Lives, illustrated by Edward Gorey.

    Grant, Ambrose Bierce, Mary Chesnut, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Oliver Wendell Holmes prove Wilson to be the consummate witness to the most eloquently recorded era in American history.

    

    Watson's account of Chinese writing from the time of the Chou dynasty (1100--249 B.C.) to the Latter Han (25-220) is accompanied by a chronology, biographical information, and a selected list of translations.

    

    But in any such enquiry, we are immediately challenged at the outset by a pertinent and disquieting question. Why write about poetry, when the poets themselves are there to speak? Everything they have to say, they can very well say for themselves: do we not ‘murder to dissect’? For there is much truth in what Sir Walter Raleigh said when he set out to lecture about Christina Rossetti. ‘The worst of it is you cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of really pure water—it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures. The only thing that Christina makes me want to do, is cry, not lecture.’ And it is true that when we criticize poetry, when we analyze form and rhythm and metre and imagery and words, and as much of the whole technical mystery of transforming experiences into language as we can, at the end we are sometimes reminded of the comment of Mutt to Jeff on hearing that water was to two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen: ‘Good heavens, ain’t there no water in it?’

    It includes sections on Proust's earlier works.

    Wallace Fowlie makes a comprehensive study, showing Mallarmé's influence, in language and style, on such successors as Gide and Claudel, Eliot and Yeats. The translations of Mallarmé's principal works are particularly sensitive.