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Constituent and Pattern in Poetry is a collection of essays on literature and language. It is built on the assumption that works of literature have existence in the real world and that they may be analyzed in a fashion that is not totally subjective. Using models derived from structural linguistics, Archibald A. Hill presents a number of theoretical contributions to the study of poetry, as well as new ways of looking at specific poems. The book as a whole provides an overview of the tools and ideas Hill has developed for analyzing works of literature, and it is the first time the essays have been gathered together in one volume.

The book is divided into three sections: Definition of Literature and Study of Its Patterns, Types of Meaning and Imagery, and Principles for Interpreting Meaning. Each section opens with a theoretical essay, followed by three essays that work analytically with specific poets and poems using the methods defined in the first. In his examination of such poets as Hopkins, Browning, Milton, Blake, Keats, and Dickinson, Hill uses such proposals as the law of least lexical contribution and maximal contextual contribution; the hypothesis that, when possible meanings occur together in a cluster, they support each other; and the idea that it is sometimes possible to recover underlying language sequences from which the author has departed for identifiable reasons. By applying these suppositions to the study of particular poems, Hill shows how the reader may arrive at statements about the relative artistic merit of works of literature.

The Chinese Communist government places a high priority on the development of industry in its national economic plans. Anxious to show advancement, it has published gross values of industrial production for the years prior to 1961 and corresponding indexes. Many of these data are biased and unreliable.In The Rate and Pattern of Industrial Growth in Communist China, Kang Chao carefully reconstructs two sets of industrial production indexes that are more meaningful and reliable. He also lays out the statistical procedures necessary to construct new indexes that reflect fundamental economic facts in contrast to official statistics. His approach represents an excellent model for others to follow in index-making for countries with limited output statistics and production cost data.The appendix contains valuable tables on China's industrial output, commodity by commodity, as well as on industry employment, wages, and prices. These tables were compiled from diverse and scattered sources and represent the most comprehensive compilation for that sector ever to appear except for the classified statistical documents of the Chinese Communist government.