This book has four main elements : chapters concerned with topics in literary criticism; chapters offering approaches to unseen texts; a series of practical exercises and a large number and wide range of prose and verse extracts. Billy Collins: Books. The name of the game. Answers followed by questions. The myth of the correct answer. Seeing through language. What is practical criticism? Is there such a thing as 'literary' language? Cope: Reading Scheme. Pieces for writing about. Who's who and what's what. Auden: Who's who. Eight popular heresies. The good one. A traveller's guide to words. The Englishman abroad. Byron: The road to Oxiana. Anglo-Saxon and Latinate words. Discotheques untouched by time. Hillaby: Journey through Britain. The Eskimoes have a word for it. Hillaby: Journey through love. Chatwin: In Patagonia. Fleming: Brazilian Adventure. A diction checklist. Peasants, pastorals and sentences. Artificial naturalness. Marlowe: The Passionate Shepherd. Raleigh: The Nymph's reply. Wordsworth: The Prelude. Intermission: sentences. The dung of the soul. Faulkner: As I lay dying. Lawrence: The rainbow. Gibbons: Cold comfort farm. Three styles of sentence. Out on your ear ... Jacobsen: Peeping Tom. ... and into the fields. Berger: Pig Earth. A prose checklist. Metaphor 1: Holy Kitchens and drunken pilots. Carter: The kitchen child. Lehmann: The weather in the streets. Dickens: Hard times. Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby. Hemingway: A moveable feast. Fleming: Brazilian adventure. Metaphor 2: All at sea. Worms. Deep water. The ground (and the vehicle and the tenor). Dissimiles (a game). Fastness and speed. Metaphor as concentration, metaphor as expansion. A digression. The importance of being different. Raine: The new hospital. Fanthorpe: After visiting hours. Lessing: Briefing for a descent into hell. Metaphor 3: Up the river. Symbols. Raban: Old glory. Fanthorpe: Rising damp. Metaphor 4: Wholes in the ground. Carper: The resident poet. Greeks and romantics: two ways of looking at metaphor. Single, double and complex vision. A metaphor checklist. The angel and the private eye. Once upon a time ... Unusual for a Monday. Write your own story. The private eye. Wade: The three keys. A greyer area: The crime novel. Higgins: Kennedy for the defense. The private I. Auster: New York trilogy. Women and rhyme. Poetic injustice. Rhymes and regulations. Hacker: Villanelle: Late summer. Stevenson: By the boat house, Oxford. Women in love. A rhyme checklist. Woman incognito: Adams: The Oxfam coat. Rhyme games. Rhymes and rhyme-schemes. Form 1: Disguises. Prose masquerading as verse, verse masquerading as prose. Form 2: Rhythm. The ear inside your head. Rhythm methods. Christopher Smart: Jeoffrey. Kevin's bike and Wordsworth's Daffodoils. A caution. Metrics and metrical verse. Stress-verse. Form 3: Sound effects. The music of poetry. A short glossary of sound effects. The Xanadu sound: Coleridge: Kubla Khan. Form 4: Free verse. Lawrence: New poems. Auden: The dyer's hand. Pound: E.P. Pour l'Election de son Sépulchre. Eliot: The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The imagists. Pound: A few don'ts by an imagiste. Basho: 2 haiku. Russell: By the margin of the great deep. Lowell: An aquarium. Cummings: I'm. Fish, wolves and cats. Hughes: Pike. Williams: As the cat. Cummings: (I'm)c-a-t(mo). How Claire does it: the drafting process. Graves: The Cool web. Thomas: Words. Claire's method. An A to Z of irony. (An ironic anthology). Loos: Gentlemen prefer blondes. Rhinehart: The dice man. Sterne: Tristram Shandy. Calvino: If on a winter's night. Tinniswood: Tales of Witney Scrotum. Levey: Man at work. Pope: The rape of the lock. Farrell: The Singapore grip. Satire: Shelley: Ozymandias. Thompson: The pro-flogging view. Orton: Loot. Chesterton: How I found the Superman. How to seduce a member of the opposite sex. Sonnets by Constable, Shakespeare and Daniel. Shakespeare: Othello. Rossetti: Remember. Cope: Message. Organised violence: Sexnviolence. Fathers: I wept for the people. Thwaite: Soldiers plundering a village. Farrell: The siege of Krishnapur. Forché: The colonel. The year in brief. Beer: January to December. The back room. Goldbarth: A history of civilization. Damn Yankees. Trollope: Domestic manners of the Americans. Dickens: Martin Chuzzlewit. Raban: Old glory. Boyd: Stars and bars. Ghost ships and gruesomeness. Marquez: One hundred years of solitude. Walcott: The Schooner 'flight'. Poe: The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Flagwaving. Keillor: Lake Wobegon days. Phillips: State of Independence. Dead sentimental. Dickens: The old curiosity shop. Chatwin: On the Black Hill. Dickinson: I heard a fly buzz. Wider issues. Getting on. Tremain: The New people. Cook: Missing persons. Joseph: Women at Streatham Hill. The wind-up: some modern critical theories. Language and ideologies. Schools of hard knocks. Barthes: Mythologies. Politics. English as he spoke: feminist criticism. Closing with an open text. Blake: Infant Joy. Blake: London. Questions to sleep on.