The point of view for my work as a critic -- Literary love -- Sublime strangeness -- The influence of a mind on itself --
Shakespeare, the founder -- Shakespeare's people -- The rival poet: King Lear -- Shakespeare's ellipsis: The Tempest -- Possession in many modes: the sonnets -- Hamlet and the art of knowing -- Milton's Hamlet -- Joyce...Dante...Shakespeare...Milton -- Dr. Johnson and critical influence --
The skeptical sublime -- Anxieties of Epicurean influence: Dryden, Pater, Milton, Shelley, Tennyson, Whitman, Swinburne, Stevens -- Leopardi's Lucretian swerve -- Shelley's heirs: Browning and Yeats -- Whose condition of fire? Merrill and Yeats --
Whitman and the death of Europe in the evening land
Emerson and a poetry yet to be written
Death and the poet: Whitmanian ebbings
Notes toward a supreme fiction of the romantic self
Near the quick: Lawrence and Whitman
Hand of fire: Hart Crane's magnificence
Whitman's prodigals: Ashbery, Ammons, Merwin, Strand, Charles Wright.
