Extraordinarily rich and awesomely learned . The complexity of its subject matter is here mastered in an exemplary fashion. The study offers detailed, concrete, and perceptive assessments of individual writers within a lucid and carefully balanced design . As a work of striking originality as well as formidable yet lively scholarship, Green’s book will become a central, even classic, text for students of Renaissance poetry and of a cardinal topos in the history of criticism and hermeneutics. -From the citation for the award of the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, 1982

An outstanding example of learning fully commanded and applied with uncommon perception, a lively sense of historical continuity, and, not least important, productive familiarity with modern literary theory. In its breadth of knowledge, the interplay of literary history and theory, the maturity of its judgments and the urbanity of its style, Professor Greene’s study is a most distinguished achievement of American scholarship. -From the citation for the award of the Annual James Russell Lowell Prize, given by the Modern Language Association of America, 1983