"Although everyone knows that humanity is only one strand in the web of creation, one can rarely speak about man's condition as a creature without eliciting defensiveness and confusion." It is to man's condition as a creature, his need and indeed drive to regain his primary organic unity with the rest of creation, that Stanley Burnshaw's title [The Seamless Web] refers. It is to that particular drive that he connects the work of the artist—all artists, but more particularly the poet, whom Stanley Burnshaw considers to be the archetype of the artist. And it is to an elucidation of the nature of the poet's activity that The Seamless Web addresses itself…. In [Burnshaw's] investigation he considers a wide variety of approaches to art: Freud and the various brands of psychoanalysis; structuralism and the "new critics," exploring the limits of their approach with great clarity and intellectual precision...