"In his 'Defense of Poetry,' Shelley wrote that "it is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations, for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age." A group of eminent international scholars decided to extend Shelley's assertion that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" to literary scholars as well--at least to one in our cohort, whose achievements are praised in the following 1000 page volume ..."