Passion and Precision

Book excerpt: Passion and Precision contains twenty essays on a range of major medieval and modern English and Irish poets. The first part consists of three chapters on Chaucer, including a substantial new study of Troilus and Criseyde, four on Chaucer’s great contemporary the Pearl-poet, and one comparing the two poets. The core of the second part is six chapters on T. S. Eliot, three of them pioneering explorations of his poetic language. They are preceded by three on Hopkins, Shelley and Yeats (including a new study of Yeats’s verse-technique), and followed by one on David Jones and Auden, and two on Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney. The previously published essays have been extensively revised, supplemented with appendixes and cross-referenced, and a full Bibliography and Index are provided. The author brings to his reading of ten representative poets from two widely separated periods of English literature, the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries, the same passionate and precise attention as they brought to their writing.