Tracing a lifelong and at times against-the-grain engagement with some of the most challenging and rewarding works of the 20th century, this collection maps some of the most dependable critical routes in the heart of modernism--American, English, Irish, and continental. Starting with an exemplary definition of modernism in "The Poet in the Imaginary Museum" and following with essays from a five-decade period about Eliot, Yeats, and Pound and about music and fiction, a tutored eye is cast over the modernist movement.