The poetics of belief

The guiding theme of this collection is the concept of the "poetic imagination." Here the emphasis is on a group of writers and thinkers that have embraced, each in his own way, such a concept only to have been misunderstood or ignored by their later readers and interpreters and thus to have been disregarded or held to be irrelevant in the present academic climate. These essays demonstrate that the community of literature is a living one, in which the present can speak to and even modify the past, as the past can speak to and modify the present and the future.