Tests of Time
by William H. Gass | 
The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays
by W. H. Auden | 
Selected Essays
by T. S. Eliot | 
Homage To Daniel Shays
by Gore Vidal | 
Inner Workings
by J. M. Coetzee |
The World Within the Word
by William H. Gass |
Finding a Form
by William H. Gass | 
The Hunter Gracchus
by Guy Davenport | 
Quarrel & Quandary
by Cynthia Ozick |
The Geography of the Imagination
by Guy Davenport |
Essays & Introductions
by W. B. Yeats | 
Every Force Evolves a Form
by Guy Davenport | 
Less Than One
by Joseph Brodsky | 
The Necessary Angel
by Wallace Stevens |
Required Writing
by Philip Larkin | 
Habitations of the Word
by William H. Gass | 
Halls of Fame
by John D'Agata | 
Inside The Whale And Other Essays
by George Orwell | 
The Purloined Clinic
by Janet Malcolm | 
The Wet Collection
by Joni Tevis |
The essays in this collection were written as reviews, mainly for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, on books by or about Alexander Pope, Vincent van Gogh, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, and A. E. Housman, or as introductions to editions of the classical Greek writers, the Protestant mystics, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Tennyson, Grimm and Andersen, Poe, G. K. Chesterton, Paul Valéry, and others. Throughout, these prose pieces reveal the same wit and intelligence-as well as the vision-that sparked the brilliance of Auden's poetry.