The anatomy of influence: literature as a way of life

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

Whitman's tally

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.