A sustained set of critical lectures and essays offers definitions of poetry and close readings of English verse and drama, combining aesthetic theory with textual and biographical commentary. The writer articulates poetry’s relation to imagination and feeling, then evaluates major figures—Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Cowper, Swift, Young, Gray, Collins, Burns—and the old ballads, and considers contemporary poets of his day. A separate sequence examines Elizabethan dramatic literature, and a prefatory critical list and notes supply bibliographical guidance and interpretive context.