The quality shared by the seven major poets - Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rudyard Kipling, A.E. Housman, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen and Philip Larkin - whose work is appraised in this original and comprehensive study is their Englishness. Each was at the same time a traditionalist and an innovator, and part of John Whitehead's purpose has been to examine their indebtedness to previous writers. Sufficient biographical detail is given to set the poetry in its social and historical context.

Written also as acts of homage, the essays by paying close attention to the language used by these poets encourage in the reader the habit of teasing out of each line its lightest nuance, so enabling him to enter into the poet's mind at the moment of composition.