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“... We cannot let Shakespeare alone. He saw so deeply into life, and wrote so well, that we cannot bring ourselves to relegate him to his Elizabethan world, as we do, or used to do, with Jonson. Yet when Shakespeare is taken out of period, his works become problematic, since they are not referred to appropriate contexts, to the domains of assumption they address ...”

“... Eliot may not have been wrong in valuing ‘workshop criticism’, or criticism by poets. True, criticism as we know it consists largely of interpretation and evaluation, activities in which writer-critics have no special advantage over critics pure and simple (if the latter description will quite do for Post-Structuralists). But writers have a manifest advantage in criticism that addresses the craft of literature ...”

“... Collaborative writing is necessarily less common in the humanities than in science and medicine. And it seems rather less common now than in the Forties, when I was making a false start in medicine (the decade when Wimsatt and Beardsley collaborated on The Verbal Icon). Is it that we have become more competitive, more serious? ‘Not on your life, boy,’ my colleague John Hay in the anatomy lab used to say, but he would be helpfully turning a cadaver’s hand in response to my ‘Give me some palm, Olive’ and didn’t have to say he meant quite the opposite ...”

“... so extensive that instance and rule are always pulling against each other. One of the many things Alastair Fowler shows in the course of this fantastically learned and occasionally perverse book is that to think about literary names you have to think about more or less the whole literary system; and when you do so, individual instances of literary names ...”

“... to decide that we have known it all along. It would be difficult to follow this convention with Alastair Fowler’s book. Kinds of Literature contains nothing subversive of public order or contrary to revealed truth: indeed it is a celebration of order and aims to illuminate neglected truths. And its traditional material is handled in such a way as to ...”

“... of philosophical collaboration always assume it. So it is interesting to observe that in Alastair Fowler’s one-man History of English Literature, a terrifically professional job, Shakespeare has to share thirty pages with the whole of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Fowler, an expert in genre, divides his ...”

“... a spirit of enquiry impatient of traditional, conventional sentiment’. Their successor, Alistair Fowler, prefers not to think in terms of a root-and-branch reform of poetic tradition. He points, instead, to a recovery of Classical genres such as elegy, satire, epigram and georgic, and to a new freedom in the choice of subject-matter. And although his ...”

“... from the Trinity MS, still under ban at the time of the first edition; the Milton volumes of Alastair Fowler and John Carey; and a good many others, including, more recently, multi-volume editions of Shelley, Browning and Dryden. The editors are expert and the poets are major poets, so that it seems surprising, but only at first glance, that these ...”

“... for concealing its politics behind apparently ‘natural’ images. But there is some force in Alastair Fowler’s counter-argument that Jonson’s poem, far from excluding labour, helped to pioneer in England a Georgic tradition that gave it a renewed dignity; some of the mystifications have come, not from the poem, but from 20th-century critics ...”