Professor Brooks is one of the best critics in America and this book is a 'must' for all those who are interested in the evocation of language. The method he uses is to proceed from individual analyses to general conclusions regarding the nature of poetry. Because the poems are representative of every period of English literature, the authority of the conclusions is strengthened, and because, with one or two exceptions, all the poems are familiar to the common reader, the book has a general as well as a particular appeal. Sensibly, the author has relegated the more technical parts of his argument to an appendix which is available for those readers who are interested, and intrudes as little as possible on the book proper. One of the major advantages of this scholarly book is that it compels a fresh consideration of poems which have become so familiar to us that we no longer felt their full impact. Chapters include: 'The Language of Paradox'; 'The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness'; 'The Light Symbolism in "L'Allegro-II Penseroso"; 'What Does Poetry Communicate?'; 'The Case of Miss Arabella Fermor'; 'Gray's Storied Urn'; 'Wordsworth and the Paradox of the Imagination'; 'Keats's Sylvan Historian: History Without Footnotes'; 'The Motivation of Tennyson's Weeper'; 'Yeats's Great Rooted Blossomer'; & 'The Heresy of Paraphrase'. Appendix 1: Criticism, History, and Critical Relativism Appendis 2: The Problem of Belief and the Problem of Cognition Appendix 3: Texts of Poems, etc. Some contemporary newspaper reviews of the book loosely inserted.