Michael Alexander was, until his retirement, the Professor of English Literature at St Andrews University. He is the author of the Penguin Classics Beowulf, The Earliest English Poems and The Canterbury Tales: The First Fragment. His critical study The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. His other books include A History of Old English Literature and Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England. He lives in Wells, Somerset.