bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Transition from Harmonium: Factors in the Development of Stevens' Later Poetry
Authors: Doggett Frank
Published: February 2007

Stevens' literary correspondence discloses some of the factors that determine the character of his later poetry. These formative elements are his changing concept of the ideal nature of poetry, his habits of work, his tendency to think inductively. Before 1930 Stevens was an advocate of the doctrine of “pure poetry,” but later became interested in the function of thought in poetry. Answering the questions of his critics, he pondered the significance of images and figures in his poems. His discussion of some of these figures shows an inherent tendency to expand them into universale. The pressure of business limited the amount of time Stevens felt he could devote to a poem. He did not build his poems from verbal elements or textual modification. He created from a preliminary meditation and depended for wording on his genius for improvisation. The meditations out of which his poems emerged could be more or less philosophical, or as slight as the evocation of a sense of place. Whatever thought prompted a poem Stevens wished that poem to be a complete idiomatic expression of it.
The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction
Authors: Ong Walter J.
Published: February 2007

Whereas the spoken word is part of present actuality, the written word normally is not. The writer, in isolation, constructs a role for his “audience” to play, and readers fictionalize themselves to correspond to the author's projection. The way readers fictionalize themselves shifts throughout literary history: Chaucer, Lyly, Nashe, Hemingway, and others furnish cases in point. All writing, from scientific monograph to history, epistolary correspondence, and diary writing, fictionalizes its readers. In oral performance, too, some fictionalizing of audience occurs, but in the live interaction between narrator and audience there is an existential relationship as well: the oral narrator modifies his story in accord with the real—not imagined—fatigue, enthusiasm, or other reactions of his listeners. Fictionalizing of audiences correlates with the use of masks or personae marking human communication generally, even with oneself. Lovers try to strip off all masks, and oral communication in a context of love can reduce masks to a minimum. In written communication and, a fortiori, print the masks are less removable.
The Ceremony of Innocence: Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol
Authors: Gilbert Elliot L.
Published: February 2007

Sophisticated readers of A Christmas Carol, moved though they may be by the dramatic reformation of Scrooge, are frequently inclined to question the psychological validity of the old man's change of heart. Far from being a sign of the story's inadequacy, however, this divided reaction is the key to its effectiveness. Dickens' chief target in A Christmas Carol is Scrooge's nineteenth-century rationalism, and the reader's skepticism about the old man's moral and spiritual recovery is an exact analogue of that rationalism. What the reader's delight, in the face of his skepticism, suggests, therefore, is that there is a level of the story on which Scrooge's regeneration is entirely authentic; that if A Christmas Carol is less than convincing as a psychological case history of an elderly neurotic temporarily reformed by Christmas sentimentality, it is certainly a success as the metaphysical study of a human being's rediscovery of his own innocence.
“Life Studies”—Robert Lowell's Comic Breakthrough
Authors: McFadden George
Published: February 2007

The fifteen “Life Studies” poems are distinguished as a separate work from the rest of the Life Studies volume. Their unicity arises from Lowell's use of the Freudian myths of maturation and the family romance, from a (largely Freudian) comic emphasis, and from a rhetorical, rather than merely confessional, project of the poet to vindicate himself by means such as Pound used in The Pisan Cantos. Lowell's parents are the victims of comic degradation in the poet's struggle to achieve maturity; his Grandfather Winslow is both a savior, as father surrogate, and a threat to dominate Lowell. A “plot” including parenthood, the loyal intimacy of his relationship with his wife, and Lowell's comic self-acceptance helps to give “Life Studies” a sense of renewed vitality. Also, Lowell's new, more open style reflects his response to the movements of the fifties in American poetry and supports the mythic and comic structures of renewal in the work.
Friedrich Spee's “Arcadia” Revisited
Authors: Rener Frederick M.
Published: February 2007

Literary historians and critics from the nineteenth century to the present have attributed Friedrich Spee's descriptions of nature to his personal experience. Except for a few instances of biblical influence, these passages are variations of the topos locus amoenus with many of its less common classical features: the park-orchard-garden varieties of landscape, typical epithets, and catalogs of trees and plants. In the Trutznachtigall, the section with the largest pattern of the topos are the laudes, commonly considered to be derivations of the Psalms, while the eclogues (“Arcadia”), a genre traditionally associated with the topos, has only a few samples of it. Rather than being a rigid formula the topos becomes an elastic pattern whose size and components Spee tailors to the individual poem, providing at the same time a distinct diction and a variety of formulations. This may be one reason why Spee, who is in every respect a poeta doctus, has been mistaken for a Pre-Romantic poet.
The Personal Element in Dryden's Poetry
Authors: Fujimura Thomas H.
Published: February 2007

Although Dryden is generally regarded as a public poet concerned with public themes, in the last fifteen years of his life he turned to more private themes to justify himself and his career. We need to be aware of the autobiographical element to appreciate such poems as the “Ode to Oldham,” which is not only about a fellow writer but also about Dryden's own achievements as a satirist. The “Ode to Mrs. Killigrew,” a Catholic poem, expresses his new awareness of the art of poesy and enacts its ritualistic drama of penance for his “sins.” The epistle “To Congreve” is a cathartic expression of Dryden's bitterness as a “cast” poet and of his hopes in a beloved protege while “Alexander's Feast,” by a poet who had just triumphed over many adversities, asserts the poet's power and greatness. These poems are more meaningful if read with awareness of them as personal revelations and affirmations of Dryden the man.
The Bible and Les Fleurs du mal
Authors: Henry Freeman G.
Published: February 2007

Forum Policy: Members of the Association are invited to submit letters commenting on any article published in PMLA, or on matters of scholarly and critical interest to readers generally. Such letters, if accepted by the Editor, will be sent to the author of the work commented on, who will be invited to reply. The usual rules regarding courtesy and avoidance of personalities will be enforced, and the Editor reserves complete discretion in deciding whether or not to publish any letter. Letters should not exceed 1,000 words of text. Footnotes are discouraged and should be included only when absolutely necessary.
The Telltale Teeth: Psychodontia to Sociodontia
Authors: Ziolkowski Theodore
Published: February 2007

The prevalence of dentists in recent novels by Grass, Bellow, Updike, Pynchon, and Vonnegut suggests a shift in cultural attitudes toward teeth. Teeth have conventionally represented potency, beauty, or pain. The first attribute is most common in myth, folklore, and psychoanalysis. The topos of beautiful teeth, familiar in literature from the Old Testament to Poe, was inverted parodistically by fin-de-siècle writers like Mann and Benn. The attribute of pain assumed particular significance for Dostoevsky, H. C. Andersen, and Mann—heirs of the romantic association of disease and art—as a clue to the psychic state of the individual. Following the revival of the organismic theory of society, decaying teeth were seen to provide a more general symbol: in the novels of Koestler and Greene dental health consistently reflects social health. Hence the dentist enters contemporary fiction as psychic healer and social analyst.
Some Contexts for Bede's Death-Song
Authors: Chickering Howell D.
Published: February 2007

When read in the contexts of psychology, theology, and Old English poetry, Bede’s Death-Song can be confidently valued as a fine poem, and not merely as venerable wisdom. The design of this eighth-century poem shows substantial correlations with the design of the Epistola Cuthberti, in which it appears. The letter appears to combine eyewitness report with hagiographic conventions. Ambivalence at meeting one’s Judge is expressed both in its narrative and the poem; troubled feelings are balanced by a certain faith. Scriptural echoes reveal Cuthbert’s conscious intention to present the Bede of the letter as an imitator of Christ. Comparison with other Old English poetic treatments of Bede’s theme shows that the poem fully exploits the artistic potential of the vernacular tradition.
Objective Image and Act of Mind in Modern Poetry
Authors: Altieri Charles
Published: February 2007

One major theme in modernism is the desire to wring the neck of rhetoric. The best modern poetry feels compelled both to accept the metonymic mode of discourse and to transcend it to allow for the full play of human consciousness without making consciousness equal interpretation of experience. Both the symbolist mode of Yeats and Eliot and the objectivism of Williams and contemporary poets can be seen as methods for responding to this problem. Symbolism seeks to complement the objective image by reconstituting versions of Idealism’s Absolute Self. The poet achieves a vision of the fullness of human consciousness by meditating on the implications of his own creative act, a process first adumbrated by Flaubert. Williams, on the other hand, particularly in “The Red Wheelbarrow,” brings the full play of consciousness into objective experience by seeking to render the act of mind as a process sharing the palpable physical qualities of things.
Tartuffe and the Mysteries
Authors: Gutwirth Marcel
Published: February 2007

The invention of Tartuffe is decisive in the evolution of Molière’s art. As parasite, he shifts the action of the comedy indoors, accenting both inwardness and concealment. As agent of the father’s “holy experiment,” he inaugurates the Andromeda scheme whereby Molière’s fathers regularly will hand over a beloved daughter to the misfit who mirrors the dark state of their own souls. As charlatan of piety, he poses a challenge to the age which his creator was to pay for dearly in a five-year struggle to gain for his play the freedom of the stage. Though the denouement of Tartuffe is essentially political—reflecting the challenge by a political cabal to its right to exist—the comedy proper ends with its villain stripped of the protective cloak of the religion of an unseen Presence, by an appeal to the palpable truth of the religion of ancient Greece where comedy originated.
Detachment and Engagement in Shakespeare's Sonnets : 94, 116, and 129
Authors: Neely Carol Thomas
Published: February 2007

Sonnets 94, 116, and 129 are unique in their mode and function. They are general, impersonal, deliberately detached from the conflicts explored in surrounding sonnets. However, the model created in each sonnet breaks down, resulting in heightened conflict in ensuing sonnets. Sonnet 94 creates a hypothetical “they” who share the conventional Petrarchan beloved’s incorruptible beauty and self-possession. But as the sonnet proceeds, the model collapses, and the corruption of the friend is painfully confronted in Sonnets 95 and 96. Similarly, the abstract model of perfect love in 116 is qualified in the couplet and destroyed in Sonnet 117. Sonnet 129 begins by defining lust as, like the love of 116, absolute and inalterable, but concludes in paradox, thus serving as a paradigmatic introduction to the dark lady sonnets. These three sonnets, however detached and immobile, participate in the ceaseless flow of the sequence, reacting to or acting upon the surrounding sonnets.
Erlebte Rede in Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften
Authors: Kahn Ludwig W.
Published: February 2007

Die Wahlverwandtschaften is an early example of the sustained and systematic use of “erlebte Rede.” This fact has remained generally unrecognized to the detriment of a correct reading. It is of paramount importance to know whether Goethe or a narrator speaks with authorial authority, or whether a narrator draws back the curtain to let us overhear the preformulated, groping mediations of one of the characters. By its very nature, “erlebte Rede” is ambiguous, multileveled, hovering between objective assertion and subjective consciousness. By using “erlebte Rede” the narrator does not withdraw behind his characters (contrary to some critics); he is often present as an ironic artist who manipulates and “exhibits” his characters. By revealing subjectivity as subjectivity, the narrator, in a sense, reestablishes an ironic objectivity. (In German)
On Fluellen's Figures, Christ Figures, and James Figures
Authors: Levin Richard
Published: February 2007

The method used by some recent critics to prove that certain Shakespearean characters are “figures” of Christ (or of other biblical or Renaissance personages) was parodied by Shakespeare himself in Fluellen's comparison of Henry v to Alexander the Great. Its success is guaranteed in advance, since it allows the critic to select only the similarities between the two persons being compared without considering whether these are unique or whether they are more significant than the differences between them. The evidence is thus subjected to a double screening: the critic determines which events in the character's career can be compared to the historical personage, and then which aspects of those events are relevant to the comparison. Even the differences between them can be converted into positive evidence. It is therefore possible by this method to prove that almost any character is a figure of Christ or of King James or of almost anyone else, which is the great strength of “Fluellenism” and also its great weakness, since a method that can prove anything proves nothing.
Julien Green's Troubled American: A Fictionalized Self-Portrait
Authors: Libhart Byron R.
Published: February 2007

Julien Green's locating numerous fictional works (novels, stories, one play) in America has not been considered particularly significant, as these works share with those set in France common themes, moods, and character types which seem to transcend the specific national settings. In those works set in America there is, however, an unusually close relationship between the personal tragedies and the national milieu, certain problems of American life seeming to engender the dilemmas that lead the characters to tragic outcomes. Yet these circumstances are not so typically “American” as suggestive of problems the French novelist himself, born in France of American parents, encountered during the three crucial years he reluctantly spent in America following World War t. His lengthy Journal and some recent autobiographical works reveal that the principal dilemmas that torment his American characters relate to those which the unusual circumstances of his double nationality created for him: problems centering about the matters of national belonging and personal morality (relative to American puritanism). Green's American heroes are primarily transformations of himself, created partly to purge himself of his own tragic inclinations, partly to recapture a period of his life which, though fundamentally painful, had overtones of sweetness because of his first sexual awakening.
Perception and English Poetic Meter
Authors: Boomsliter Paul C. , Creel Warren , Hastings George S.
Published: February 2007

Metrical organization exists more importantly in the pattern constructions of the listener than in the physical signal. It serves a major function in control of attention, as prosodic features do in daily speech. The accents of speech are timed attention peaks, presenting meanings for which they prepare our attention in advance. Metrical organization fosters expectancy through larger durations—metrical stanzas are larger expectancy spans. The metrical effect is not a mere physical drumbeat; it is an atmosphere of shaped sustained expectancy. Perception is an active process, in which the perceiver contributes pattern. The rhythm of speech is a conspicuous example of such contribution. A technique for investigating and demonstrating the order contributed by meter is provided by unled choral reading.
Design in Deloney's Jack of Newbury
Authors: Dorsinville Max
Published: February 2007

Jack of Newbury's surface realism in characters, setting, and speech has led to an underestimation of its historical and literary value. A close reading reveals the consistent use of the Greco-Roman ethical-political conception of the state, epitomized in the figure of the ruler. Deloney shows his familiarity with this tradition, probably known to him through Erasmus and Sidney, in the three controlling motifs of his novel. First, the middle class of weavers, represented in Jack's household and dramatized in allegories and symbols, is portrayed as a self-sufficient state where peace and harmony reign. Second, this state is shown to be such because of the nature of its ruler, Jack, a benevolent, generous, wise man. Third, the middle-class way of life—hard work, thriftiness, material gains—serves as princely education; accordingly, Jack, from a menial position, goes on to become ruler of the state. Jack of Newbury, as a systematical reordering of an aristocratic tradition, represents the world view of the emergent middle class; and as such, a momentous shift in the social temper of the Renaissance and an important step in the evolution of the novel.
Billy Budd and Melville's Philosophy of War
Authors: Adler Joyce Sparer
Published: February 2007

Billy Budd concentrates Melville's philosophy of war and lifts it to its highest point of development. The themes of the work extend ideas he had developed since his youth, and its poetic conceptions are the offspring of earlier ones expressive of his thought on “the greatest of evils.” In Billy Budd the philosophy is conveyed entirely by poetic means—conceptual imagery and form; symbolic characters, actions, questions, contrasts, and contradictions; interplay of sight and sound; and pictorial representations of social realities. The work conveys both the abhorrence of war underestimated by those who, in the classical argument about Billy Budd, interpret it as Melville's “testament of acceptance” and the nonironic, even luminous, affirmation of man's latent humanity overlooked by those who read the book as irony, rejection, or darkness alone. In the course of his last artistic exploration Melville discovered that within the most cruel contradictions of the world of war lies the potential for its metamorphosis.
Luther and Literacy
Authors: Haile H. G.
Published: February 2007

Luther studies have traditionally been confessionally oriented. Today, this author's significance is also secular, and it is most readily interpreted by disinterested literature teachers. Disputes about his writings radically increased European literacy rates. His songs and pamphlets engaged popular tradition in order to achieve broad, democratic appeal. Aside from the increase in readership after 1518, Luther as critic and interpreter brought about a more important qualitative change in literacy. In this way, he influenced writings of other lands and of later centuries. He treated the Bible as literature with great relevance to the individual life. Karl Holl and Heinrich Bornkamm give excellent accounts of his hermeneutics, but the literature student is most impressed by Luther's imaginative participation in the text. He took his contemporaries and countrymen into account, and their experiences, in order to achieve a meeting between their passions and those of the biblical authors.
Literacy and Literature
Authors: Howe Florence
Published: February 2007

In a period of few jobs, low morale, and powerlessness, teachers of English and modern languages—at all levels from elementary through graduate school—need to reexamine the value of their work. Central to understanding the crisis of the profession is the historical separation of the study of literature from the teaching of literacy. The separation rationalizes the profession's hierarchy and defines its practice in the classroom. Thus literature becomes a luxury and the teaching of skills empty of literary power. That our curriculum needs revision follows quite naturally, moreover, from the knowledge that more than 70% of our undergraduate majors are women and from the evidence that the curriculum from elementary school on is male-biased and thus distinctly harmful to at least half the population. Whether we choose to renew our responsibility for teaching meaningful literacy, or to work cooperatively as literature teachers within interdisciplinary programs, we will also need to reevaluate and change the canon of literary study, especially to include those who have been traditionally bypassed: women, minorities of both sexes, and working-class people. For all these, literature and literacy can provide courage and skills necessary for survival and growth.
The Conclusion of Richard Wright's Native Son
Authors: Siegel Paul N.
Published: February 2007

Both Max's courtroom speech in Richard Wright's Native Son and his final scene with Bigger have been grievously misunderstood. The numerous critics of the novel have regarded Max's speech as a Communist “party-line oration” whose propaganda is poorly related to the rest of the book. Rather, Max seeks desperately to avert the cataclysmic end toward which he sees American society heading by striving to have wrongs redressed. Bigger, however, finds a meaning in his life by accepting his feelings of hate. This is not a defeat for him, as critics have asserted. Hatred of the oppressor is a natural, human emotion which, used as the motor power of an idea driving toward a goal, can transform both the individual and society. As Max says, “The job in getting people to fight and have faith is in making them believe in what life has made them feel. . . .” This is the belief Bigger finally acquires. With this belief comes a sense of comradeship with those whites such as Jan who have earned such comradeship in action.
Reformation Attitudes toward Allegory and the Song of Songs
Authors: Scheper George L.
Published: February 2007

Common generalizations about Reformation attitudes toward allegory are based on polemical denunciations by reformers of medieval “dialectical” exegesis. But Reformation definitions of the senses of Scripture are basically in accord with the definitions of medieval theologians. The reformers' attempts to draw a radical distinction between typology and allegory never succeeded and Reformation commentaries continued to allegorize, as demonstrated in the numerous Protestant commentaries on the Song of Songs. The crucial difference between medieval and Protestant spirituality in the Song commentaries lies not in their attitude toward allegory but in their conception of the nuptial metaphor, wherein human love symbolizes the love between God and man. Some Protestant commentators deny there is any reference to carnal love at all; those that do not, regard the metaphor as too dangerous for explication. Generally, they see that the aptness of the metaphor lies in the moral, domestic virtues of the marriage contract. In contrast, the mystical tradition of the Song, epitomized in Bernard, sees that the metaphor's aptness lies precisely in the passionate nature of the sexual union: it is the union of two in one flesh that is the most perfect symbol of the love of God.
“Figurando il paradiso”: The Signs That Render Dante's Heaven
Authors: Murtaugh Daniel M.
Published: February 2007

The structure of Dante's Paradiso is a mediating sign of “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Each time Dante the pilgrim moves to a higher sphere, his visionary power grows, passing through successive formulations of God's love. The growing beauty of Beatrice's smile measures his advance, and at several points (Par. x, xxiii, and xxviii) her words or her reflecting eyes explicate the semantic function of what Dante sees, thus projecting him one step closer to the Beatific Vision, to which all the signs refer. Finally, the pilgrim transcends Beatrice, just when her beauty transcends the poet's power to render it. In the last canti the pilgrim confronts a reality transforming itself in direct response to his visionary power, while the poet and we find vestiges of that reality in the transformations of his language through metaphor. This final dialectic of vision and language suggests themes of modernist poetry.
Monodrama and the Dramatic Monologue
Authors: Culler A. Dwight
Published: February 2007

The term “dramatic monologue” was not in use when the great Victorian dramatic monologues were being written. They were sometimes called “monodramas,” which Tennyson defines as works in which successive phases of passion in one person take the place of successive persons. This agrees with the form as invented by Rousseau in Pygmalion (1763) and as practiced in Germany from about 1772 to 1815. It is related to other forms, e.g., the “attitude,” in which virtuoso performers attempted to portray rapidly shifting roles through pantomime. Monodrama was introduced into England by William Taylor of Norwich, Dr. Frank Sayers, Southey, and “Monk” Lewis; and Tennyson’s Maud, “Locksley Hall,” and “CEnone” have some characteristics of the genre. The form arose partly out of the prosopopoeia and should be distinguished from the Browningesque dramatic monologue, where the “drama” is normally between the speaker and the reader rather than between different phases of the speaker’s soul.
The Deceptiveness of Lazarillo de Tormes
Authors: Mancing Howard
Published: February 2007

The anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes is a master of deception. He makes his protagonist supremely attractive to the reader by contrasting him with unlikable characters (the blind beggar, the priest, the squire) and by the intimacy of autobiography. The reader increasingly sympathizes with Lazarillo, reaching in the third chapter a point of genuine admiration for the boy’s self-sacrifice at the time of greatest physical suffering. The author then creates an illusion of passing time to reach the book’s final scene, in which the mature Lázaro profits from the sexual exploitation of his wife. Lazarillo de Tonnes, comic only on a superficial level, presents a corrupt society that forces its materialistic values on even its most virtuous members; Lázaro, like all men, eventually compromises. The reader, so attracted by the young Lazarillo who dominates the work, often fails to see the odious Lázaro who finally emerges and obliterates his former self.
Spenser and the Renaissance Ideal of Christian Heroism
Authors: West Michael
Published: February 2007

WITH THE REEMERGENCE of the classics in the Italian Renaissance, particularly Homer, the concept of a Christian hero as distinct from the Christian champion arose to shape an enormous body of European literature. Broadly speaking, we may describe Christian heroism as aspiring to create an ideal figure, reminiscent of both the chivalric knight and the Christian Everyman, who might fit into a heroic poem that should at the same time rival and eclipse the epics of classical antiquity.1 Perhaps the first poem approaching such dimensions was Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, a superlative romance, but with more tenuous claims to either Christian or heroic values. Ovid, not Virgil, remains clearly the main inspiration for Ariosto's playfully pagan sensuosity, and only by strenuous allegorical interpretation can Christianity be construed as a major force in the poem. Significantly, however, such interpretation was by no means lacking in sixteenth-century Italy, where a host of commentators eagerly supplied it. Concurrently in Portugal Camoens could describe Vasco da Gama's daring voyage with a truly missionary zeal and so create a narrative where heroic action genuinely dramatizes the virtues of the Christian faith. But except for one peculiar episode the Lusiadas lacks the dimension of romance. The curious allegory of the Island of Love with which the epic concludes is apparently evidence of Camoens' felt need to define however hastily his military hero's relation to a world of pastoral romance, where hero and lover are inseparable.
Dialogue and Doctrine in Leone Ebreo's Dialoghi d'amore
Authors: Perry T. Anthony
Published: February 2007

ON ITS LITERARY LEVEL Leone Ebreo's Dialoghi d'amore (Rome, 1535) is presented as a long courtship between an ardent lover, Filone, and his reluctant mistress, Sofia. At one point the clever lady summarizes their respective attitudes by the casual observation that, while she is more interested in the theory of love, Filone is more bent on the practice thereof.1 This wry comment is a capsule of the entire work, for it explains not only the constant narrative shift between amorous language and philosophical approfondissement, but also the basic paradox that pervades the entire Dialoghi, that of theoria versus action, which appears as the tension between Filone's amorous involvement and Sofia's aloofness but especially as the opposition between the via contemplativa and the via activa!1 In this paper we shall suggest that Leone Ebreo's work may be defined as a dialogue between two philosophies of life or “kinds of people,” the contemplative man and the active man, and that these two human types are represented by the two interlocutors, Filone and Sofia. This view will require revision of the usual critical approaches to the Dialoghi. For one thing, if we take Leone's title seriously and consider the work as a true dialogue, as a confrontation of two substantially divergent points of view, then it is difficult to describe it as essentially a monologue in which only one of the characters—Filone—expresses the author's ideas. Moreover, in addition to the purely philosophical argument, we shall have to pay close attention both to the psychological nature of the characters and to the precise levels of their allegorization. In short, we shall no longer be able to neglect the work's literary nature.3 vient thin
Whitman and the Phrenologists: The Divine Body and the Sensuous Soul
Authors: Wrobel Arthur
Published: February 2007

Insisting that the “Me” is the center and meaning of all experience and that reality is indistinguishable from the self, Whitman turns to the phrenological concept of the soul as the agent that makes the physical self susceptible to the spiritual and the infinite. He insists that it is the soul's office, literally, to translate the sensuous data apprehended by a physiologically endowed man perfectly attuned to the universe into the spiritual truths that are integral in the mystic union of all Being. So closely does Whitman identify robust health with spiritual awareness that this forms the basis of his materialistic monism, arguing that the body and the soul are merged into an indivisible One. Since the body is the soul, the sensible is in fact the suprasensible, and matter is mind, dualism presents no problem. Instead of the two principles, in Whitman a single identity is achieved when the active soul “charges” the surrounding universe and perceives the ideal in the actual. Major phrenological ideas also inform Whitman's unique equalitarian transcendentalism, his sensual mysticism, and his poetic catalogs where the persona, fusing with a cumulative imagery, signals his union with the larger Oneness where all contradictions are resolved.
Lord Weary s Castle Revisited
Authors: Fein Richard J.
Published: February 2007

Lord Weary's Castle conveys Robert Lowell's sense of historical destruction during and immediately after World War ii. Efforts by Lowell to relieve his despair by integrating it with Catholic belief, with Classical themes, with his knowledge of European and American history only succeed in confirming the apocalyptic view. The religious poetry in particular seeks a redemptive state beyond the poet's consciousness of war and violence, but usually results only in confirming the sense of destruction. The nervous, insistent rhythms of the poetry are themselves expressions of Lowell's compulsion to deal with violence and aggressive intrusions on man's consciousness. Finally, no religious or stylistic allegiances, no awareness of history, enable Lowell to transcend the obsession with war. Throughout the book, the poetry expresses pity for the victims of military aggressions. In Lord Weary's Castle, Lowell is disturbed by American military aggression from colonial Indian battles to World War ii; it is a distraught sense of American experience that would continue to haunt his poetry in the following decades. In this insistent consciousness of war, Lowell's poetry touches on our deepest concerns.
Conscience and Antimilitarism in Vigny's Servitude et grandeur militaires
Authors: Haig Stirling
Published: February 2007

Alfred de Vigny's Servitude et grandeur militaires is a highly personal work, but it is related to the historical and literary conjuncture of the 1830's, which saw the French army's Napoleonic grandeur sullied in the suppression of working-class revolts. A refutation of Joseph de Maistre's concept of the soldier as an apocalyptic executioner and Lamennais's denigration of the soldier's honor, Servitude is a characteristic Vigny triptych, but only the third tale, “La Canne de jonc,” provides a morally determining lesson. Here the necessity of experience in the formation of conscience is emphasized. The hero of the tale, Captain Renaud, who throughout his career meets a series of negative and absent fathers (suggesting a metaphysical void that must be filled with human values), inadvertently kills a young Russian cadet during the campaign of France. Years later, Renaud is mortally wounded by a talionic reincarnation of the enfant russe, and expiates his crime in stoic silence. Conscience, as in Vigny's poetry, is attained in the grandeur and honor of silence and renunciation.
The Role of Rimbaud in Char's Poetry
Authors: La Charité Virginia A.
Published: February 2007

René Char acknowledges that his major poetic precursor is Arthur Rimbaud. Char is esthetically indebted to Rimbaud for his creative vision, teleology, and practice. The numerous thematic affinities between these two poets include a humanized harmonious universe, the attitude of revolt, the obligation of anguish, the poet as the initiator of action, and the concepts of poetic activity, love, experience, risk, man, nature. The poetic matter of their creative worlds is identical, but Char brings the necessary corrective of faith in human expression to Rimbaud's immature reliance on verbal expression. Where Rimbaud fails to synthesize the fragments, Char succeeds. It is Char's understanding of Rimbaud's work that enables him to evolve a poetic based first on life and second on theory. Char does not merely humanize the cosmos; he goes on to poeticize man. Technical similarities are equally numerous, but Char is disciplined; he rejects the equation of the act and expression in favor of an evocation of the activity through the effect of spontaneity, his theories of pulverization and crispation. Char overcomes Rimbaud's limits and frustrations and succeeds in fulfilling his vision.
Mill as Sage: The Essay on Bentham
Authors: August Eugene R.
Published: February 2007

Although regarded as a philosopher rather than an artist, John Stuart Mill employs artistry as well as rational argument to enlighten his reader. Mill's “Bentham,” for example, demonstrates how Mill operates as a sage using both logic and art to awaken the reader to a new perception of reality. In “Bentham” Mill creates a sense of disappointment arising from Bentham's great promise and limited performance, both as thinker and as man. Constructing an image of himself as a whole thinker, Mill thereby underscores Bentham's position as half-thinker. Mill also creates an elaborate portrait of Bentham as a great father-teacher-hero-God figure, only to reveal Bentham's inability to perform these roles adequately. By heavy use of negatives, Mill suggests that Bentham's thought has little positive value. And, finally, the essay's structure undermines all of Bentham's philosophical contributions. Deriving from Carlyle's “Boswell's Life of Johnson,” Mill's earlier writings on Bentham show him refashioning Carlyle's language and developing the ironic techniques used in “Bentham.” Like other Victorian sages, Mill has no clear-cut theory of prose artistry; he often regards poetry and prose as antithetical media. Nevertheless, in practice he writes as a complex logician-artist, using prose as an imaginative medium.
Presidential Address 1975
Authors: Brée Germaine
Published: February 2007

The MLA is a vital association whose aim is to maintain the study of languages and literatures as a necessary and basic component of our culture. Its evolution in the last few years, guided by the suggestions of the membership and implemented by the central MLA Headquarters’ Executive Director and staff, corresponds to the evolution in our cultural and educational situation. But in 1975 the Association, whether as a whole or via its individual members, has not taken any effective stand to counteract the deleterious effects upon the profession of an economic and cultural regression that is threatening the future of humanistic study in schools and universities. An overall effort to counteract the present trend is indispensable.
Great Expectations: “the ghost of a man's own father”
Authors: Dessner Lawrence Jay
Published: February 2007

Critical difficulties with Great Expectations prompt a psychoanalytic approach and consideration of the literary use of Freudian concepts and of the complex relationship between Dickens and Pip, dreamer and dream. Edmund Wilson stressed biography and the trauma of the blacking warehouse. Freudian theory stresses infantile trauma of the sort the novel’s first scene hints at: the death of brothers and parents. The intensity of Pip’s ambivalence and of his guilt and self-abasement suggests that Pip’s story projects and explores feelings of his creator. Many characters in the novel exhibit or parody Oedipal antagonisms. There are many father figures, deprived children, and allusions to patricide. Magwitch is the “father” Pip craves, the best giver and receiver of both punishment and forgiveness. Joe Gargery does not punish though Pip urges him to. Jaggers insists on neutrality. Magwitch fills Pip with excessive dread; his death, loving Pip and being loved by him, satisfies Pip’s psychic needs.
T. S. Eliot's Raids on the Inarticulate
Authors: Harmon William
Published: February 2007

J. Alfred Prufrock’s pathetic admission—“It is impossible to say just what I mean!”—states a central theme of many of T. S. Eliot’s works, which concern the frustrated struggle to achieve satisfactory expression. The poems are varied “raids on the inarticulate” (“East Coker”) by the inarticulate. Their failure of speech leads, in many poems, to the shifting of verbal action to nonhuman agents—a process epitomized by the thunder’s utterance, “da,” in The Waste Land. Given the weaknesses of language, the poems display a baffling world in which neither principles nor particulars can be expressed, so that poetry fails to work and, ultimately, ceases to matter. Among such inadequate words, Eliot concentrates, ironically or devoutly, on the paradox of the Incarnation expressed as the wordless Word. The end of Eliot’s exploration is a vision of a condition of stillness, which poems can point to but never reach.
Presidential Address 1976*
Authors: Frye Northrop
Published: February 2007

THE PRESIDENCY of the MLA is a short-term office, perhaps designed to represent the usual academic attitude to official positions. As president, I have had the honor of writing begging letters to some of you, but the title of PMLA, which I might assume on the analogy of the Royal Academy, is otherwise engaged, and chairing half a dozen meetings does not, even in these instant-administration days, leave much of an odor of charisma behind. I understand that in the recent election campaign President Ford's advisers tried to take advantage of the fact that the American system does not distinguish between the head of state and the head of government. They felt that, if an incumbent President would just stand there, his impressive position would have the best chance of being confirmed by the vote. But the MLA does distinguish the two, and Bill Schaefer will remain the head of government after the head of state has vanished into limbo tomorrow night, like one of the divine kings in The Golden Bough, who hears the grinding of axes in the background as soon as he has failed to satisfy one of his wives. However, the ritual banquet on his body and blood has been commuted to an allegory. He is required only to make the equivalent of a speech from the throne, a speech that is an expression neither of royal will, as in Tudor times, nor of government policy, as now, but is rather an effort to express a collective consciousness, to gain some perspective on this confused and crowded assemblage.
Tennyson's Optics: The Eagle's Gaze
Authors: Joseph Gerhard
Published: February 2007

The visual focus in Tennyson's poetry moves between particularized objects and hazy vistas. His particularist bent, arising in part from myopia, coincided with the bias of an age that both exalted the Symbol and revered empirical observation. But Tennyson's fears of psychic entrapment within the object and of nature's uncontrollable prolixity inclined him alternatively toward the receding “past” and the distanced “picture.” This tendency reinforces itself through the correlative temporal and spatial frames of his poetry: “modern frames” enclose his “pasts”; “casements” focus his “pictures.” Tennyson thus exemplifies the Victorian attempt to reconcile particulars and universals, and the “telescopic dualism” of nineteenth-century painting and poetry, wherein detailed foregrounds and indefinite, receding backgrounds are discrete. In Tennyson such a division distinguishes a material world precisely apprehensible through sight and a spiritual one that fades toward diaphaneity. The paradigm for Tennyson's unattainable goal of optical (and epistemological) inclusiveness is “The Eagle.”
God, Satan, and King Charles: Milton's Royal Portraits
Authors: Bennett Joan S.
Published: February 2007

Between the interpretation in Milton's prose works of the monarchy of Charles I and the portrayal in Paradise Lost of the tyranny of Satan there exists an extensive and complex consistency based on the concept of the divine right of kings, a doctrine that informs the character and world view of Satan as well as of King Charles. In his effort to counteract the Eikon Basilike's picture of Charles as a Christlike martyr-king, Milton drew in Eikonoklastes—albeit in fragmentary form—his own essentially fictional characterization of Charles as a tyrant. This analysis, continued in the Defences, studies Charles's personal heroism, political behavior, delusions about himself, his followers, and his cause and is extensively paralleled in the depiction of Satan. These prose works thus serve as a valuable literary gloss on Paradise Lost—on certain details of imagery and characterization and on Milton's conception of true liberty and revolution.
The Pardoner's Homosexuality and How It Matters
Authors: McAlpine Monica E.
Published: February 2007

Evidence from other medieval texts suggests that the phrase “a mare” in the portrait of Chaucer’s Pardoner should be translated “a homosexual.” While the establishment of this gloss does not eliminate the alternative interpretation of the Pardoner as a “geldyng” or eunuch, it does obligate us to explore the implications of the Pardoner’s possible homosexuality. His pardons and relics provide a link between this sexually anomalous Christian and his church. Unable to confess his sin, the Pardoner seeks forgiveness vicariously through the sale of pardons; believing his body to be a vessel of sin, he seeks, through the display of relics, affirmation that his body is also a temple of God. Although Chaucer sees homosexual acts as sinful, he appears not to view them as uniquely detestable; the suggestion of homosexuality contributes not to the portrait of a damned soul but to the representation of the “sondriness” of humanity.
Calvino at a Crossroads: Il castello dei destini incrociati
Authors: Schneider Marilyn
Published: February 2007

In the two parallel stories that constitute Il castello, some suddenly mute travelers use tarot decks to communicate their horrific tales to one another. Ultimately, the ghostly kings, queens, knights, and other conventional or famous literary characters who inhabit these novellas delimit two “voices” that frequently overlap and even coincide: the narrator-author’s and the spectator-reader’s. The violent chivalric world of war, love, and magic that generates the narrative action also produces a metanarrative dimension that asserts the text’s subject as writing and reading, while simultaneously figuring Calvino’s own writerly persona. The Number One tarot, Il Bagatto (The Minstrel), often images Faust in the fiction but more importantly images the writer, a (Marlovian) Faustian conjurer destined to fail. The ever-changing sequences of the cards allegorize the making of a fiction, while the deck itself allegorizes the plenitude of the finished text, unattainable by its author.
Language, History, and Text in Eliot's “Journey of the Magi”
Authors: Harris Daniel A.
Published: February 2007

“Journey of the Magi,” anticipating the Four Quartets, constitutes a vision of historical process and a metaphor of religious mystery more complex than in Eliot's earlier work. Experimenting with dramatic monologue, remembering Browning's interest in the Higher Criticism, Eliot juxtaposes oral recitation against recorded account to provide an analogy for the Incarnation. As elsewhere, Eliot finds symbol and writing suspect: the Magus, in ironic ignorance, uses literally a figurative language Christianity had not yet created, but he intuits the Word better than readers steeped in biblical symbolism. Simultaneously Eliot interfiliates the Magus' speech with Matthew's gospel, Andrewes' 1622 Nativity sermon, and his own “impossible” re-presentation of the original utterance: the resulting historical sequence, collapsed by anachronisms, makes the poem's structure emblematize the Logos. Through the ostensible “loss” of the scribe's transcription, Eliot implicitly questions biblical canonicity and the traditions of Christian interpretation. The poem approximates his religious position in 1927.
Mark Twain: The Writer as Pilot
Authors: Burde Edgar J.
Published: February 2007

Clemens’ complex feelings about his piloting days provide insights into his imagination and his identity problems. Despite his nostalgia, Clemens feared the river and exorcised his fears by imaginatively identifying with Horace Bixby, his former steamboating master. Drawing upon his recollections for “Old Times on the Mississippi” in 1874, Clemens became a figurative master pilot, using the same order of memory that Bixby demands of the cub. Clemens’ 1882 river trip was motivated in part by an unconscious desire to recover his intuitive “Bixby memory”; he was searching for both his former master and his own imaginative self. The trip, however, was a sign that his intuitive memory had failed him and he was depending on direct observation. His “invocation” of the hateful pilot Brown (with his chaotic, literal memory) at the beginning of the 1882 writing of Life on the Mississippi foreshadows Clemens’ failure to achieve imaginative coherence in the second part of the book.