Originally published in 1976. Representing years of critical reflection, attempts to construct a poetics of "presence." Within a wide range of critical terminology, Murray Krieger has sought to create a new vision. In language that is passionate and often dramatic, he looks at the multidimensionality of the poetic world through the lens of Western poetics. His work clearly addresses itself to post–New Critical questions: how to preserve the literary object as a thing to be perceived, valued, and enjoyed and yet to account for its presence in, and interaction with, our culture as a whole, always in danger of being dissolved into man's language-making and -forming activity in general. Our awareness of the poem as object must be modified by our awareness that it is an "intentional" object. Krieger develops his balanced vision in three parts.