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For their learning and sharp accuracy of judgment, I am indebted to the two scholars who read my manuscript for the University of Virginia Press. I am also grateful to the Press’s Humanities Editor, Cathie Brettschneider, for her generous counsel and support, and to Colleen Romick Clark for her careful editing of the text. I owe most to the intellectual acumen and imaginative insight of my wife, Carol, a scholar whose grace of mind and manner has made the advancing years a climax, and marriage a harvest of memories in common . I owe a more distant debt of gratitude to the graduate students at the University of Toronto who twenty years ago in a seminar on Victorian poetry persuaded me to offer extra sessions on the Victorians and Shakespeare. Since that time the poetry I have committed to memory has been alive with the sound of Clough quoting Hamlet, Hopkins echoing King Lear, and Lady Macbeth talking through Christina Rossetti. I keep overhearing Othello and Hamlet in Tennyson, and a host of Shakespearean voices in Browning. My most long-standing debt of gratitude is to the late Harvard scholar Reuben Brower. In the tutorials I conducted for him and in a graduate seminar on John Dryden, he showed me that literary history is the exact opposite of what I thought it was: not a museum of inert ideas but a playhouse of dramatic tones and contending voices. He taught me how a history of literary influence can encourage rather than suppress critical intelligence. For a young student raised as an undergraduate on historical scholarship alone, as for many other sons and daughters of Ben, this was a great enlightenment. His bounty as scholar and mentor had no winter in it. It was an autumn that grew the more for reaping. Acknowledgments ...

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