This sharply focused collection of essays on poetics and poetry, with special attention to Shakespeare, includes the work of some of the nation's best-known and most respected scholars and authors. All of them are former colleagues of O. B.

Hardison, Jr., and their major new essays, written especially for this collection, center on his interests: Aristotle and classical poetics, Petrarch and Italian poetics, the English Renaissance, especially Shakespeare and Milton, and postmodernist work in theory, literature, and science.