The invention of literature -- Reflections on the word Genius -- Burke, Wordsworth, and the defense of history -- William Cobbett, reformer -- Keats's politics -- The genealogy of disinterestedness -- Emerson and The ode to W.H. Channing -- Literary radicalism in America -- A simple separate person -- Kipling's jest -- Edward Thomas and modernism -- The sense of vocation in Frost and Stevens -- Some uses of biography -- Why authors do not create their own worlds -- Literature and theory
