Few admirers of the criticism of T.S. Eliot have been able to read anything but summaries or extracts from the eight unpublished lectures on metaphysical poetry that he gave at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1926, or the revised sequence delivered in Baltimore in 1933. Mrs Valerie Eliot commissioned a scholarly edition of this material, resulting in this book. Eliot himself was reluctant to publish the lectures at the time as he considered many of his remarks in need of qualification, clarification and the checking of details of fact and authority. Eliot's theme in these lectures is the relations and affinities between the poetry of Donne, Crashaw and Cowley in the 17th century, Dante and Cavalcanti in the 13th, and certain French poets of the late 19th century, notably Laforgue and Corbiere.