The Figure of Echo

Book excerpt: "In this essay on 'what the imagination has made of the phenomenon of echo, ' the author examines certain aspects of the figure of echo in light of their significance for poetry. Looking at echo in its literal, acoustic sense, echo in myth, and echo as literary allusion, Mr. Hollander concludes with a study of the rhetorical status of the figure of echo, and the ancient and newly interesting trope of metalepsis, or transumption, which it appears to embody. Centered on ways by which Milton's poetry echoes, and is echoed by, other texts, The Figure of Echo deals well with Spencer and other Renaissance writers, with romantic poets such as Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth, and with echoes of their nineteenth-century forebears in such modern poets as Hardy, Eliot, Stevens, Frost, Williams and Hart Crane."--Front dust jacket inside flap.