A Shaping joy

The uses of literature.--The modern writer and his community.--T. S. Eliot: thinker and artist.--Poetry since The waste land.--Joyce's Ulysses: symbolic poem, biography or novel.--Poetry and poeticality.--W. B. Yeats as a literary critic.--Auden as a literary critic.--The criticism of fiction: the role of close analysis.-- American literature: mirror, lens or prism?--The American "innocence" in James, Fitzgerald and Faulkner.--The Southern temper.--Southern literature: the wellsprings of its vitality.--Faulkner's treatment of the racial problem: typical examples.--Faulkner as a poet.--The doric delicacy.--Edgar Allan Poe as an interior decorator.--A. E. Housman.--Wordsworth and human suffering: notes on two early poems.--Milton and the new criticism.--Eve's awakening.--The unity of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.