This collection of 12 essays is the fourth in a series published under the auspices of the forum on psychiatry and the humanities, the washington school of psychiatry. its ostensible topics—freud, poe, blake, coleridge, wordsworth, hart crane, shaw; solitude, dreams, allegories, and defenses—do not offer much guidance to the prevailing approach of the collection beyond the fact that all the essays, in one way or another, treat texts from a psychoanalytic point of view.

Some groupings do emerge, however, as well as recurrent methods and themes. it would have been helpful if the editor's introduction had charted some of the main problems around which various essays tend to cluster. as it is, the introduction is lucid but deals only with harold bloom's opening essay, “freud's concepts of defense and the poetic will.”

Bloom reinterprets freud's “defense” in the light of nietzsche's “will” (that is, “the will's resentment against time”) and in the light of concepts of