Charles M. Doughty is known today almost exclusively as a Victorian prose writer, not as a twentieth-century poet. He is the author of Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), a highly personal and yet scientifically valuable record of his solitary wanderings in the years 1876-1878 in one of the most forbidding regions of the world. Welcomed by the learned, the book was read with great admiration by literary people such as William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and Robert Bridges but only gradually established itself as an astonishingly original and powerful handling of English prose. It reached a larger public in abridged form as Wanderings in Arabia Deserta (1908) and in second (1921) and subsequent editions, which include an introduction by T. E. Lawrence. It has won the highest praise, on literary grounds, from a variety of critics, and even F. R. Leavis, no admirer of Doughty the poet, could say no worse than...