This chapter explores Byatt's concern with the ‘thinginess’ of human existence over and against the fantasy worlds provided by the fairytale form. It draws parallels between The Children's Book and some of Byatt's slightly earlier fictions, such as The Biographer's Tale and Angels and Insects. This chapter provides a glimpse into a curiously un-novelistic and anti-individualistic ethos and notes that these three texts give the reader powerful images of humans as types, composites, or mere representatives of a species.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to show that the meanings of poems are hardly ever deliberately or deviously hidden, nor are they usually encrypted in poetic devices like assonance or alliteration. A poem usually passes through various stages of development as it evolves towards its final form during the composition process. In the case of Neil Armstrong's 'poem', there is no known manuscript source, so the surviving audio-tapes of the event must be taken as its equivalent moment of origin. The book also aims to show that we do not have to tune into phonetic bat-squeaks from the hinterlands of language in order to read and appreciate a poem.

This chapter comprises an introduction to the conversion narrative and prophecies of Katherine Sutton, selected reading, and extracts from her only published work, A Christian Womans Experiences of the Glorious Working of Gods Free Grace (1663). Sutton was a Particular Baptist and Fifth Monarchist, connected to the London Baptist Church of Hanserd Knollys who wrote the preface to the work, who fled to Holland after the Restoration (the work was published in Rotterdam). Sutton's traumatic experiences (including illness following childbirth and surviving a shipwreck) were interpreted by her as God continuing to sanctify her through the Holy Spirit and deaden sin within her.

Queen Anne inherited the throne as the younger sister of Mary, who had ruled jointly with her husband, William of Orange. The succession literature of 1702 struggled to construct a successful model for Queen Anne. Anne's connections to the party politics of her time also shaped many of the responses to her succession. On the occasions of earlier Stuart successions, it had been almost inconceivable that writers would criticize a monarch. The English Muse: Or, a Congratulatory Poem in the form of a Pindaric ode, was published anonymously. It compares Anne with Elizabeth I, then dwells upon her fertility, her husband and her physical appearance.From Albina, or The Coronation takes its title from 'Albion' (England). It presents Anne as a female ruler of almost mythic capacities and recalls the allegory of John Dryden's opera on the succession of James II, Albion and Albanius.

This chapter addresses the issue of text and context in poetry. The panel of poetic print takes up a relatively small area in the centre of the page, and the rest contains nothing but white space. The chapter presents two examples of Irish poets or poets closely associated with Ireland. The first poem is Ciaran Carson's 'Edward Hopper: Early Sunday Morning, 1939', and, as its title indicates, it is about Hopper's painting Early Sunday Morning. The next, and rather more complex, example takes us further back in literary history. It is a poem by Edmund Spenser from his Elizabethan sonnet sequence Amoretti and Epithalamion, which was written in celebration of his marriage to Irish heiress Elizabeth Boyle. Spenser is a notorious figure in Irish culture, being an English writer who received land grants in Ireland as a reward for taking part in a ruthless and punitive expedition against the Irish.

This chapter presents the opening lines of The Prelude, William Wordsworth's epic poem about the development of his own mind and poetic sensibility. The poem is revolutionary in many ways, being essentially a poetic autobiography, but nothing about the opening lines hints at that, for they are quietly reflective and unhurried. Poetry written in iambic pentameter uses lines of a fixed length of 10 syllables, each line having five main stresses and five 'feet'. Lines in iambic pentameter can be either rhymed or blank verse, as in the case of The Prelude. Poets other than Wordsworth often used iambic pentameter in the format known as heroic couplets. The ballad metre, as seen in popular verse narrative, might be regarded as a looser system of metrics than the other forms so far considered, because it combines lines of two different lengths to produce its characteristic running rhythm.