First published in 1958, Poets’ Grammar treats of a few grammatical forms and inflexions as they function in the work of some English poets and dramatists. For this purpose, the author is less concerned with the primary meaning of the word Grammar, as given by Shorter Oxford Dictionary, namely “that department of the study of language which deals with its inflexional forms or their equivalents with the rules for employing these correctly”, than with that subordinate meaning of the word, as defined by the same dictionary, namely “an individual's manner of using grammatical forms.”
The book discusses important themes like tense in medieval pageant and poem; pronoun and verb in Shakespeare; Elizabethan and Jacobean ‘personal’ insights; Shelley and the future tense; and preposition in poetry and translation. This is an interesting read for scholars and students of English literature and English poetry.