In 1929 Wilson Knight wrote an essay 'Myth and Miracle' which deeply impressed T.S. Eliot. So deeply, in fact, that Eliot offered to persuade the Oxford University Press to publish Knight's essays and to write an introduction for them himself. The result was The Wheel of Fire, one of our century's seminal books on Shakespeare. At the same time Eliot sent Knight an inscribed copy of his poem 'Marina', 'a perfect poetical commentary', as Knight observed, 'on those Shakespearian meanings which I had unveiled'.

LRB 2 August 1984 | PDF Download