Contents

Prologue

1 The Common Reader

2 Milton in Old Age

3 Wallace Stevens: Dwelling Poetically in Connecticut

4 T. S. Eliot: The Last Classic

5 William Empson: The Critic as Genius

6 Freud and Interpretation

7 Divination

8 The Plain Sense of Things

9 The Argument about Canons

10 The Bible: Story and Plot

Notes

A Note on the Author