During the past 50 years the study of literature has given successive prominence to history, formalism and to theory. Throughout his distinguished career, and in such books as "The Sense of an Ending", "The Classic", "The Genesis of Secrecy", "Forms of Attention and History" and "Value", Frank Kermode has always kept these features of literature simultaneously in focus. In this book, he sets out to reestablish contact between literary history and poetic form in readings of Horace, Marvell and Auden. In part an explicit comment on new historicism, this lecture is accompanied by a manifesto for literary study of the Bible informed by historical scholarship, techniques of close reading and by the theory of narrative. This book offers both a view of Frank Kermode's current preoccupations and a sense of their place in his intellectual career.