Leon Edel's masterly career in literary psychology, expressed in this superb collection ["The Stuff of Sleep and Dreams: Experiments in Literary Psychology"], reveals the process by which the artist's private myth is transformed into a dream we all can share.

"Art is the result," Edel writes, "not of calm and tranquillity, however much the artist may, on occasion, experience calm in the act of writing. It springs from tension and passion, from a state of disequilibrium in the artist's being."

Edel's essays explore the grace and the courage by which the artist maintains his inner chaos in service of his muse. Surrounded by a sea of critical jabberwocky, Edel's sensitivity is an island of clear light: direct and careful in method and articulation, serving the proper function of criticism, to direct the reader back to the work of art with new perspective for appreciation.

Edel argues against those critics who "make light of 'psychologic signs'; they describe them as 'reductive'; they say that 'psychologizing' reduces a work of literary imagination to a diagnosis or a label." But reductive criticism "occurs usually in the work of amateurs who are toying irresponsibly with psychoanalytical concepts…. We are not 'reductive' when we seek out motivations and origins to show an artist surmounting difficulties by large acts of the imagination and the primacy of craft."

Instead, the literary psychologist, following Edel's lead, performs the highest kind of "sympathetic criticism": "the critics as helpmate, as explicator, as friend, not only of the common reader but of the artist himself."…

Edel came to call his … approach "literary psychology," based on his vision of all literature as "a form of disguise, a mask, a fable, a mystery: And behind the mask is the author." While others of his contemporaries would turn their study to the reader's response or solely to the text, Edel concentrated on "what literature expresses of the human being who created it." His interest is in process, when agony transcends itself and issues ecstasy. Edel rejects W. K. Wimsatt's "intentional fallacy" and stakes his claim on the undiscovered country of the artistic mind….

His purpose is to help us "understand the delicate ways in which metamorphosis takes place in our unconscious," by juxtaposing, with delicacy and sense, the published work of art with material gathered from autobiographical and biographical sources.

The book is a treasury of insights….

The essays in the third part of the book form its heart, the finest expression of Edel's method. In "Tristimania: The Madness of Art," he borrows process and term from Benjamin Rush, "the father of American psychiatry" (and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence) to bring into focus the imaginary line between insanity and creative genius that led Salvador Dali to remark, "The difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad."…

Edel sometimes glosses over the introspection of the author, implying that the writer is more or less oblivious to the psychoanalytical nuances of his work. Surely it's possible for creative genius to be self-critical and self-aware. The critic's insight, surely, isn't always superior to that of the artist. Two further steps remain to test the mettle of literary psychology: applying the method to the writer's authorial awareness, and applying it to works like Shakespeare's or Homer's.

Nonetheless, if everyone dulled by self-serving, jargon-laden lit crit were to read Edel's book, the art of criticism would experience a renaissance. Clarity, eloquence and service to beauty are hallmarks of this collection.