These essays are forays into what Wordsworth called the "hiding places"of the creative impulse. Sometimes in aphoristic form, this selection of meditations on the arts of poetry and teaching functions as an indirect self-portrait and probes the poet's Irish heritage. For Brownlow, there is a fruitful tension between scholarship and poetry; too often divorced, these activities are not for him mutually exclusive. This book asserts the autonomy of the literary imagination. His aim is to be, as in Whitman's great line, "aplomb in the midst of irrational things."