As we gradually saw, there is more to the dialogue form of our expositions than we initially realized – something new, perhaps, in poetry criticism; we could call it dialogical poetics. We are accustomed to seeing all extended commentary on poetry as the vision of some individual consciousness – the more individual and “original,” the better. There is almost always a significant degree of arbitrariness in the pronouncements of such solitary readers: associative leaps, inferences drawn, symbolic meanings perceived, that might be more or less plausible, but the justification of which we are left to figure out for ourselves if we can. In this book, by contrast, the two authors have had to justify their readings to each other, step by step; and we have left visible the process by which we worked through our perceptions to reach at least partial agreement. By revealing the process of this working-through as a process of debate and discovery, we enable readers who are not professional critics to see what happens in criticism behind the curtains of assured knowledge.