Walter Ong provides the opening essay to this general issue of Mosaic, a transcript of his lecture “Writing and the Evolution of Consciousness,” which was presented at the University of Manitoba as the seventh annual Sidney Warhaft Memorial Lecture on January 26, 1984. This essay is followed by a consideration of André Malraux’s rhetoric and Wallace Stevens’s poetic logic. The five other essays in this edition explore Soviet art, antiquity and the self, T.S. Eliot, B. Traven, and Henry James.