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In this book the author gives a minute analysis of five classic English poems, well known and widely read. The purpose of examining these five poems by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Byron is to give psychoanalytic meaning in terms of accepted concepts in the psychoanalytical literature to images, ideas and symbolic expressions, which at the surface seem to be meaningless.
The author claims that “great poems… express the unconscious patterns and conflicts which underlie everyone's mental life.”
As Dr. Bergler states in his foreword, that the reader of the book “is not asked to believe in every detail or in the general deductions,” this book is indeed open for discussion, since many conclusions seem to be rather a tour de force interpretation not convincing in light of psychology of poetical expression.
However, in spite of its controversial nature, this book makes interesting reading. Compared with the Italian book by Silvio Tissi (Al Microscopio Psicoanalitico, Milano, 1946), in which Italian poetry is being “psychoanalyzed,” Wormhoudt's book offers very little new and startling interpretation.