Our finest essayists discuss six centuries of literary genius."Genius is one of those words upon which the world has agreed to form no clear consensus," Joseph Epstein tells us in his introduction. How then shall we define "literary genius"? In this collection, twenty-five contemporary authors endeavor to answer that question by considering twenty-five classic writers and their enduring works.We learn that, more important than mere originality or creativity, it is the ability to make us experience the world in new ways that sets these writers apart. "My task," Joseph Conrad wrote, "is by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is above all to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything."Wood-engraved portraits and illustrations by renowned artist Barry Moser accompany each essay.Contents:1. Tom Shippey on Geoffrey Chaucer2. Lois Potter on William Shakespeare3. Reynolds Price on John Milton4. Anthony Hecht on Alexander Pope5. David Bromwich on Samuel Johnson6. David Womersley on Edward Gibbon7. Dan Jacobson on William Wordsworth8. Hilary Mantel on Jane Austen9. Frederick Raphael on William Hazlitt10. Evan Boland on John Keats11. Daniel Mark Epstein on Nathaniel Hawthorne12. A. N. Wilson on Charles Dickens13. Justin Kaplan on Walt Whitman14. William Pritchard on Herman Melville15. Paula Marantz Cohen on George Eliot16. Bruce Floyd on Emily Dickinson17. David Carkeet on Mark Twain18. Joseph Epstein on Henry James19. Elizabeth Lowry on Joseph Conrad20. Stephen Cox on Willa Cather21. Robert Pack on Robert Frost22. Joseph Blotner on William Faulkner23. John Gross on James Joyce24. John Simon on T.S. Eliot25. James L. W. West III on Ernest HemingwayJoseph Epstein, from his introduction: "Literary genius comes in many varieties. Some literary geniuses seem natural (Charles Dickens, Mark Twain), others cultivated (George Eliot, Henry James). Some are prolific (Wordsworth, Whitman), some are more carefully concentrated (Jane Austen, T. S. Eliot). Some literary geniuses are stimulated by the difficult (Alexander Pope, John Milton). Some require absolute originality — entailing the need to invent their own style — to convey their vision (James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway). Some have perfected a form (Pope, the heroic couplet), some have tried to kill off a genre (Joyce, the novel). Not some but all literary geniuses can be read again and again, down through the generations. As Hilary Mantel, in her essay on Jane Austen, writes: 'Surely this is the definition of genius in a writer: the capacity to make a text that can give and give, a text that is never fully read, a text that goes on multiplying meanings.' Timelessness this is called, and it is another of the hallmarks of literary genius."Joseph Epstein is the author of nineteen books, most recently In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage. For more than twenty years he was editor of The American Scholar. A contributor to The New Yorker, Commentary, The Atlantic, the Times Literary Supplement, and other magazines, he also taught for many years in the English Department at Northwestern University.Barry Moser is an illustrator, author, and designer whose work appears in museums and libraries around the world. He has published nearly three hundred titles, including Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which won the American Book Award in 1983. In 1991 he won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for his collaboration with Cynthia Rylant, Appalachia: The Voices of Sleeping Birds. A member of the National Academy of Design, he has served on the faculty of Rhode Island School of Design and is currently on the faculty of Smith College. Read Less