ABSTRACT
There cannot be a neat conclusion to a book on English Studies: the spirit of the subject is the spirit of man’s struggle to express himself through words, and that struggle is endless and doomed always to fail, since words are public and formal and a great deal of what matters most to men is inexpressibly private. Perhaps the finest literature arises from a simultaneous recognition of the inevitable failure of this struggle and a determination to achieve what can be achieved through the imperfect medium of language. My basic viewpoint in this book has been that criticism achieves most when it recognises that it can never be definitive or final but sees itself as a contribution to the resonant life of a text in the minds of readers.
