The four chapters that follow present with very little change the lectures as they were given in the Lent Term of 1985. A few sentences here and there and eight lines of a poem by Emily Dickinson, omitted to keep within the limits of what one can impose upon the attention of an audience, have now been restored to the text. There is always the problem, when lectures are to be published, of reconciling the very different needs of a spoken discourse, which can be smothered by too much detail, and its printed version which allows greater density and more complication of the issues. I have attempted to hold my argument to its main points, and to make as quintessential a statement as I could of what seems to me an important case.

What that case is the titles of the separate lectures ought to show plainly enough. The Clark Lectures are supposed to deal with ‘some portion of English literature’, and it may be objected that I have complied with this requirement in a very oblique, not to say cavalier, fashion. The reader will, I trust, recognise that the very heart of my concern is the needs and prospects of our own poetry in a time of exceptional strain and confusion.