Douglas Bush was a literary critic

Literary criticism

Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...

 and literary historian. He taught for most of his life at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, where his students included many of the most prominent scholars, writers, and academics of several generations, including Walter Jackson Bate

Walter Jackson Bate

Walter Jackson Bate was an American literary critic and biographer. He was born in Mankato, Minnesota.He is known for two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies, of John Keats and Samuel Johnson...

, Neil Rudenstine, Paul Auster

Paul Auster

Paul Benjamin Auster is an American author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy , Moon Palace , The Music of Chance , The Book of Illusions and The Brooklyn Follies...

 and Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein

Aharon Lichtenstein

Aharon Lichtenstein is a noted Orthodox rabbi and rosh yeshiva.Rabbi Lichtenstein was born in Paris, France, but grew up in the United States, studied in Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin under Rabbi Yitzchok Hutner...

.

Bush's textual criticism

Textual criticism

Textual criticism is a branch of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in the texts of manuscripts...

 on Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

 and John Milton

John Milton

John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...

 was widely influential. His English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century remains a standard reference work.

Major works

• The Renaissance and English Humanism (1939).
• English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600-1660 (1st ed. 1945, 2d ed. 1962).
• Classical Influences in Renaissance Literature (1952).
• Prefaces to Renaissance Literature (1965).
• Engaged and Disengaged (1966).

Editions

• John Keats
  John Keats
  John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
  
  . Selected Poems and Letters (1959).
• John Milton. The Complete Poetical Works (1965).
• A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton." Volume I: The Latin and Greek Poems (1970).