This volume of critical essays and of creative writings brings together work by distinguished authors in many fields in honour of Alexander Norman Jeffares: English literature, Irish and Anglo-Irish Literature and Commonwealth literature, all fields which gained his interest throughout his life and to which he has contributed much, both through the spoken and printed word - as can be' seen from the bibliography of his writings at the end of this volume. Scholarship and criticism are deployed by the essayists to show how literature, by virtue of its creativity, offers a human and vivid insight into the individual in his or her society. Poets and imaginative writers of many traditions deepen and extend our understanding of the creative impulse and its immediacy through their own work.