A foremost critic of the English language here reflects on beauty and the language that it inspires in authors from Kant to Keats, Hawthorne to Housman.

"An excellent and eloquent book."-James Wood, New York Times Book Review

"A beautiful book about beauty. Enormously learned, allusive, recuperative, and citational, it is a passionate meditation on what has been said about beauty in the West from the Greeks to the present day."-J. Hillis Miller

"Donoghue talks . . . with a delightful informality and absence of dogma. . . . One of the most charming features of Denis Donoghue's book is his appendix of 'afterwords,' brief quotations on beauty from sundry writers."-John Bayley, New York Review of Books

"Continuously fascinating, continuously readable, the book speaks of beauty, and of speakers of beauty, in its own calm, steady voice. You won't want to lay it down."-Hugh Kenner