A selection of literary essays written since 1972, this book addresses in detail the work of Dickens, Donne, T. S. Eliot, Coleridge, Dr Johnson, Betjeman, Elizabeth Bishop, Saul Bellow, James Joyce, and many others. Vigilant, sceptical, mistrustful of consensus, Craig Raine stands in the tradition of poet-critics whose task, as Eliot said, is ‘the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste’.