"'So I have sailed the seas and come …,'" wrote the footloose philosopher and polymath William H. Gass, by way of introducing what is probably his best single piece, "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country." One of its strongest features is its adaptation of Yeats's marvelous line in "Sailing to Byzantium": at once a cock-crow of triumph at having escaped that country of dying generations, and a prayerful hope of being gathered "into the artifice of eternity." (p. 202)

How to escape? is the problem, theme, story line, and old refrain, in The World within the Word…. Gass, quite simply, wants to escape into print, into sound, into pure language itself, into the place where language is at its best: fiction. "When fiction turns its back on the world and walks into wonderland," he says in a defense of fiction's almost unlimited resources; that metaphor, one...