"Singing Masters is a book for connoisseurs of poetry. It spans five centuries of verse in English but is in no way a literary history or encyclopedic survey of the genre. It is instead a celebration of the poetry that has most delighted, engaged, and challenged one man in his long and distinguished career as literary scholar and critic."--BOOK JACKET. "The title of the book comes from Yeats, a poet who wanted his predecessors to be the "singing masters" of his soul. Similarly, Russell Fraser pays homage to his predecessors among the major critics. He doesn't read his poets in a vacuum, but locates them in their lives and times while focusing on the work itself. In this book, the poem is the thing, and the basic questions explored are language-centered: what kind of poem is before the reader and whether and why it succeeds."--BOOK JACKET.