A collection of critical essays examines how a poet’s imaginative work is affected by concurrent spiritual and ideological energies—philosophy, religion, patriotism, politics, and love—and how those forces compel compromises that reshape poetic form and ambition. The author probes a major dramatist’s characteristic preference for normality in portrayals of love and marriage, traces the effects of grand intellectual experiences on other poets’ scale and outlook, considers didactic impulses in philosophical verse, and asks how poetic creation in turn modifies belief and conviction.