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Of the many exploration made by psychoanalysts into the terrain of creative art, those concerned with literary works have probably been the most successful. Psychoanalysis shares with literature the crucial common coin of discursive language, while literary criticism shares with psychoanalysis an interest in meaning that is far more easily pursued in the verbal than in the plastic or musical arts. In consequence, psychoanalytic studies of literary works abound. These generally fall within two categories: one group attempts to demonstrate how various aspects of content can be related to or explained by historical and presumably unconscious aspects of their creators' lives; the second, the "creativity" of writers themselves. The present volume belongs to the second of these categories. It is unusual, however, in having been written not by a psychoanalyst but by a literary scholar, a Canadian whose grasp of certain psychoanalytic concepts is unusually impressive and whose commitment to their value in enlarging the understanding of poetry and the poetic impulse is profound. Unlike many analysts who have undertaken similar projects, however, he brings to the work an equally impressive literary