This collection of poetry contains a brief introduction, one half discussing Gary Snyder's ideas on poetry in his essay, "Poetry and the Primitive," the other half of the introduction examining the successive revisions of a poem of mine. The examination is not an explication, but rather a look at the technique used in composing this poem. The body of the thesis is a collection of my poetry which I have written within the last four years. The poems speak both of experience and postulation of ideas. Though they do not follow any select pattern of thought or form, there is some connection between them in their subject matter.

This study analyzes the development of the major characters in Fowles's novel - Charles, Sarah, and Sam - in terms of the heroic quest motif. Using the basic pattern of the heroic quest, the monomyth, that Joseph Campbell sets forth in his The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I attempt to show that Fowles's novel may best be understood as the story of three separate heroic quests whose paths cross rather than as the story of a single hero or heroine. This reading seems to account best for all elements of the novel and to explain best the final positions of the characters in question as well as providing a rich appreciation of the novel's wealth of imagery.