The high priest of high art E ver since his first book, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An essay in contrast (1959), George Steiner's work has been defined by attempts at comparison. An extravagantly broad body of work stretching over more than fifty years, a famously trilingual upbringing, and a ferocious insistence on the enduring importance of European "high" culture have made Steiner the very embodiment of post-war comparative literature. Such a lofty position is not without its perils: suspicions of presumption and superficiality have sometimes attended his dazzling range of reference. Yet there is a profound intellectual humility in Steiner's respect for the "tradition", discernible in his repeated insistence that the critic is but a postman, delivering letters from the poets. As he asserts in his autobiography, Errata (1997), "no hermeneutic is equivalent to its object". That such a broad perspective seems increasingly elegiac is not the least of Steiner's concerns. In an age of specialists, the Arnoldian ambition to encompass "the best which has been thought and said" risks seeming outdated, if not naive. Yet, in one important sense, Steiner's new book takes Arnold's definition of culture at its word. For it is arguable that the most important term in this definition is its most innocuous: how much weight does the conjunction "and" carry in bridging the gap between thought and speech? What is the force of this conjunction in the Western tradition? If the relationship between philosophy and poetry underlies much of Steiner's work, The Poetry of Thought tackles