This is a study of the way that Platonism and Neoplatonism run like a changing thread through the web of English literature. Not all of the authors here represented are English, and some did not even write in that language. But they have all contributed to a tradition which can be defined and which still continues. Our main aid to that definition has been to confine ourselves to writers who knew at least part of the corpus of Platonic texts at first hand. As can be seen from the bibliography, these texts include not only Plato's Dialogues but also the writings of the Neoplatonists, especially Plotinus, through whom Plato was read for so long. Our choice of writers has necessarily had to be selective but our chronological range from antiquity to the present offers, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of the influence of Platonism on English literature.

That very comprehensiveness is, of course, a source of danger, and our account must of necessity be both partial and personal. But this is also true of the readings of Plato and his followers by the writers who are discussed here. Plato himself was a rich and diverse writer, and every age has rediscovered Plato in a different way, and reinterpreted Platonism to suit its different understandings of the world. This is not the story of a nexus of mummified ideas carried forward by authors with a nostalgia for antiquity, but of particular people who read within a related group of philosophical texts and responded to them individually in very different contexts from the pagan culture in which Plato and Plotinus lived.