Is a poem really about itself, a form of self-enunciation or a record of the process to which it owes its origin and existence? How far can poems about poems sustain themselves before yielding to some external theme and forgetting themselves? A second section of the book consists of studies of individual poems with a close eye on particular words. These include "I wandered lonely as a cloud" and Robert Browning's "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." Why do some popular and readily comprehensible poems or particularly obscure poems arouse less attention among critics than do most other works by great poets?