Context -- Fantastic happenings and gory adventures -- The burnt fox -- Poetry in the making : three extracts -- Capturing animals -- Learning to think -- Words and experience -- A word about writing in schools -- Concealed energies -- Strong feelings -- Quitting -- Asgard for addicts -- Unfinished business -- Dr Dung -- Opposing selves -- Superstitions -- Regenerations -- Revelations : the genius of Isaac Bashevis Singer -- Music of humanity -- National ghost -- Tricksters and tar babies -- Heavenly visions -- The hanged man and the dragonfly -- The great theme : notes on Shakespeare -- Orghast : talking without words -- The environmental revolution -- Myth and education -- Emily Dickinson -- Sylvia Plath, Ariel -- Publishing Sylvia Plath -- Collecting Sylvia Plath -- Sylvia Plath and her journals -- Sylvia Plath : the evolution of ''Sheep in fog'' -- Keith Douglas -- Vasko Popan -- János Pilinszky -- Laura Riding -- Crow on the beach -- Inner music -- Keats on the difference between the dreamer and the poet -- Poetry and violence -- The poetic self : a centenary tribute to T.S. Eliot -- Shakespeare and occult Neoplatonism -- Myths, metres, rhythms -- The snake in the oak -- Sylvia Plath''s Collected poems and The bell jar.