bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
William Carlos Williams: A Testament of Perpetual Change
Authors: Quinn M. Bernetta
Published: February 2007

Few poems have ever been priced as high as William Carlos Williams' Paterson, if one may borrow the central metaphor of Book III in order to suggest the enormous cost in concentration which must be met before any adequate evaluation can be made. If this work were built around a consistently presented hero—the Paterson of the title—that cost might not be so prohibitive as many readers will find it; but when Williams asserts in the introduction to Book III (“The Library”) that Paterson is not only the hero but also the heroine, not only a city but also cliffs and waterfall, one cries out for a critic to assist him, as the sea-god did Peleus, in conquering the metamorphic problem. Before judging the total merit of Paterson, however, one must weather a preliminary season of understanding, of looking hard and often at aim and structure—in brief, of giving the poem the creative reading that such an undertaking deserves. The poet, realizing the difficulty of meeting this high cost, has given some measure of help in the headnote to the entire poem, and also in the list of topics which he places immediately after the words Book One, as if in apposition; the latter consists of eighteen phrases separated by semicolons, each phrase a possible definition of Paterson. The last of these phrases, and one which may well supply a key-quotation for this essay, is “a dispersal and a metamorphosis.”
The Errata Leaf to Shelley's Posthumous Poems and some Surprising Relationships Between the Earliest Collected Editions
Authors: Taylor Charles H.
Published: February 2007

A few scholars have long puzzled over the fact that some of the unauthorized editions of Shelley's poems which were published after Posthumous Poems (London, 1824, edited by Mrs. Shelley) contain better readings at certain points than that volume, readings which do not appear in an authorized text until Mrs. Shelley published The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1839 (London, four vols.). Robert Browning noticed this in a letter addressed to H. Buxton Forman, dated 2 July 1877, in which he says of the fifth line of “Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples,” omitted in the body of the text of 1824, “The line was first restored in a strange edition of Shelley published by Benbow in 1826; and Leigh Hunt, in 1828, quotes the poem without it, remarking on its loss: and it was myself who told him of its existence, to his surprise and pleasure.” Frederick A. Pottle, who quotes from Browning's letter in his Shelley and Browning (Chicago, 1923, p. 14), wonders how it was that Benbow obtained the missing line (p. 83). My investigation of this problem, instigated by Pottle, has led to two surprising discoveries: first, that all the modern editors of Shelley's text have failed to notice an errata leaf to Posthumous Poems which is present in some copies still extant, and, secondly, that there are important relationships between certain of the unauthorized editions which followed Posthumous Poems and Mrs. Shelley's text of 1839. These relationships, in fact, call into question the textual value of a large number of readings hitherto believed to be original to the first edition of 1839.
The Unknown Reviewer of Christ Abel: Jeffrey, Hazlitt, Tom Moore
Authors: Schneider Elisabeth
Published: February 2007

Among the reviews of poetry in the early nineteenth century few have been more celebrated, or more notorious, than the review of Coleridge's Christabel which appeared in the Edinburgh Review for September 1816. The Quarterly on Keats, Mr. Blackwood's young men on the Cockney School, Jeffrey's “This will never do” of the Excursion, and the Edinburgh Review's indirect and unwitting gift to the world of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers—perhaps only these have had greater fame, of sorts. The destroyers of new poets may have had an inkling of the vengeance of posterity, for the authorship of some of these reviews was a mystery exceptionally well preserved even for that age of anonymous criticism. Time, however, and amateur detectives have succeeded in fixing the responsibility for most of them; the review of Christabel is the chief remaining puzzle.
The Authorship of “Apollo's Edict”
Authors: Ferguson Oliver W.
Published: February 2007

“Apollo's Edict” has long been cited as a typical example of Swift's attitude towards poetic cant and outworn cliché. Set down as coming from Apollo himself, the poem illustrates a number of empty conventions and extravagant similes and forbids their use by any who would be of the true school of the god; and to aid his would-be followers in their poetic efforts, Apollo has appointed Swift as his Vicegerent on earth.
Petrarch's Attitude Toward Dante
Authors: Bevington Merle M.
Published: February 2007

It is generally known that despite Petrarch's widespread reputation in his own day as a man of letters and scholar, his opinion of Dante as a poet was at variance with the literary fortune enjoyed by Dante in subsequent centuries. Many attempts have been made, especially around the turn of the century, to explain why Petrarch failed to perceive Dante's true genius as it appears in the Divine Comedy. For the most part, these explanations fall into one of three categories. Some ascribe Petrarch's attitude toward Dante to his aversion for the vernacular; others to envy; while still others to an inattentive reading or misunderstanding of the Divine Comedy.
The Double Problem of Sir Degaré
Authors: Stokoe William C.
Published: February 2007

There is no doubt that the Middle English romance Sir Degaré (hereafter abbreviated SD) enjoyed an early success; four manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, two later manuscripts, and three sixteenth-century prints survive.1 Modern criticism of it, however, shows striking contrast. Introducing the version in Bishop Percy's Folio MS., Hales wrote: “The romance is, in our opinion, of more than ordinary merit. It possesses the singular charm of brevity and conciseness; does not impair or destroy its power by the endless diffuseness and prolixity which are the besetting disfigurements of that branch of literature to which it belongs.”2 J. E. Wells agrees: “The materials are wrought into a coherent whole without digression or unnecessary explanation… . All in all, the poem deserves the popularity that its repeated reprinting in the sixteenth century indicates it to have enjoyed” (p. 135).
Le Temps Chez Apollinaire
Authors: Champigny Robert
Published: February 2007

Le formalisme platonicien a survécu tant bien que mal jusqu'au XIXe siècle. L'échafaudage des Idées, dominé par le bouquet flétri du Beau, du Bien et du Vrai, s'écroula alors sous les coups des philosophes qui l'avaient miné depuis deux siècles. La cangue du platonisme cesse de peser sur les épaules du spiritualisme occidental. Du relativisme à l'existentialisme, en passant par Bergson, la tentation d'un absolu et d'un éternel stériles s'efface et le temps n'apparaît plus, selon le mot de Bergson, comme la petite monnaie de l'éternité. Le temps n'est plus la faiblesse de l'homme par rapport à Dieu. Dieu étant mort, le temps représente la dignité de l'homme par rapport aux choses. L'existentialisme chrétien lui-même considère Dieu moins comme éternel que comme présent.
Robert Buchanan and the Fleshly Controversy
Authors: Cassidy John A.
Published: February 2007

In the long history of literary polemics none has been more savage or more far-reaching in its consequences than the Fleshly Controversy, which raged in Victorian England during the 1870's with Robert Buchanan on one side and Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti, and the unfortunate Dante Gabriel Rossetti on the other. The literary importance of the latter three and the intensive study devoted to their careers have thrown a revealing light upon their activities in the Controversy. Robert Buchanan has fared quite differently. Although widely heralded in the 1860's and '70's as a young poet of promise, he subsequently suffered such a literary eclipse that by the time of his death he was relatively little known. Today almost everything he wrote has been forgotten and his sole claim to fame is the negative one of being the man who attacked Dante Gabriel Rossetti and brought about his premature death. This paper is devoted to an examination of his career before, during, and after the Controversy in order to throw some light upon the role he played in that melee and to show that his attack, while reprehensible, was not made without some provocation.
The Spirit of the Times and a “New Work by Boz”
Authors: Houtchens Lawrence H.
Published: February 2007

In the 1830's and 1840's members of the editorial staffs of certain American periodicals, not satisfied with the common practice of pirating the works of foreign authors, undertook the brazen expedient of writing their own selections and attaching thereto the name of some eminent foreign author. For example, when the Spirit of the Times had reprinted all of Thackeray's Yellowplush Correspondence available in Fraser's Magazine and had found it popular among the subscribers, the editors stated that they had forged for some time thereafter a continuation of the Correspondence that was as good as the original. “Our Yellowplush succeeded him of London,” confessed the journal, “and his letters were considered, in all respects, equal to those of his ‘illustrious predecessor’.” Moreover, this pseudo-continuation was pirated by at least one American periodical in Tennessee which obviously did not know that it was being gulled. The Spirit of the Times regarded the incident with amused indifference rather than indignation, not being in a position to claim copyright protection for a work which it had not called its own.
Coleridge and the Wheels of Intellect
Authors: Wiley Margaret L.
Published: February 2007

The student of Coleridge's thought is likely to turn with a sense of relief from the apparent confusion of his metaphysical and epistemological speculations to the relative calm of his semantics. Here, at least, one can operate within a well-defined area, presenting in an orderly fashion Coleridge's great respect for words, his insistence that they be used carefully, his concern with paradox and contradiction, his famous distinctions such as that between reason and understanding, and the background of such coinages as esemplastic. This area provides the clue to Coleridge's whole system and is full of implications which stretch far out beyond the realm of words.
David Garrick and The Clandestine Marriage
Authors: Bergmann Fredrick L.
Published: February 2007

Studies of influence in English dramatic writing have emphasized almost exclusively the creative tradition, giving scant attention to the influence of contemporary acting traditions as significant factors in the creative process. My intent in this paper is, by means of reversing the emphasis, to throw into sharper focus the impact of the actor on the creation of dramatic literature.
Astronomical Dating for Some of Lydgate's Poems
Authors: Parr Johnstone
Published: February 2007

The exact dates for the majority of the writings of John Lydgate have not been ascertained. Occasionally Lydgate tells specifically when he composed a poem by inserting into it a statement concerning the time of composition which makes the dating somewhat obvious; other poems have been dated according to style and versification, age of manuscripts, and topical allusions to historical events. The present paper discusses the dating of four of Lydgate's works—Temple of Glas, Troy Book, Siege of Thebes, and The Title and Pedigree of Henry VI—by means of the astronomical allusions in these poems.
Psychology and Theme in Brother to Dragons
Authors: McDowell Frederick P. W.
Published: February 2007

Warren's novel in verse, Brother to Dragons, is most notable in its philosophy and psychology and summarizes vividly his continuing metaphysical and ethical themes. Aware in his moralist's zeal “that poetry is more than fantasy and is committed to the obligation of trying to say something about the human condition,” Warren is in this work more than ever haunted by an anguished sense of the disparity in man between recurrent beatific vision and the ubiquitous evil which blights it. Accounting for the force of the book are Warren's realization of character, his flair for the arresting image and apt phrase, his evocation of situation and atmosphere, and his instinct for the telling structural contrast. Indispensable as are these aspects of literary talent to the precise rendition of value through form, they are all subordinate to Warren's tense brooding over human motivation and human destiny.
Flesh and Spirit in the Works of Unamuno
Authors: Predmore R. L.
Published: February 2007

Recent teaching duties have obliged me to reread the bulk of Unamuno's published writings. In this rereading I have been struck by three or four clusters of images that recur with what seems like obsessive frequency. The purpose of this essay is to exhibit these images and to attempt to discover what function they fulfill in Unamuno's writing.
The Differences in Melville's Poetry
Authors: Barrett Laureence
Published: February 2007

The studies of Melville's poetry have been singularly few. Certainly we could rightfully have expected more in the light of contemporary interest in his prose, and few critics would have been more likely to encourage others to further and fuller studies than those who have discussed these poems in print.
Sartor Resartus and the Problem of Carlyle's “Conversion”
Authors: Moore Carlisle
Published: February 2007

One of the things which mark Carlyle as a Romantic is the way he had of seeing the world in his own magnified image. When dyspepsia tormented him, he suffered like Prometheus, for all mankind. In the face of religious doubts he first complained bitterly, then fought like a panther, and the struggle, as fold in Sartor Resartus, was magnificent. Everywhere in Carlyle's writings, in his published works, his notebooks, and his letters, there is a playing-up of the specific to the general, the immediately personal to the universal. Small wonder if the student of his writings grows suspicious of Matilda crying Fire! And wonders whether many of the things which look autobiographical may not be, after all, largely imaginary, the products of a fertile romantic imagination. Consequently, against his steady complaints of ill health it has been observed, by Norwood Young, that Carlyle “never had a day's serious illness in his life.” And against the autobiographic character of Teufelsdroeckh's religious and moral crisis, described in Sartor, it was argued by Frederick W. Roe that Carlyle's “religious life underwent no convulsive transformation” at Leith-Walk. Finally, despite, the three chapters in Sartor and despite what Carlyle said on the subject, “The Everlasting Yea” itself may be denied, as when Sir Herbert Grierson declared in 1940 that Carlyle never really got beyond “The Everlasting No.”
Divided Command in Shakespeare
Authors: Jorgensen Paul A.
Published: February 2007

It is well known that Shakespeare's depiction of battles was limited by space, personnel, and equipment. It is not well known why, despite Ben Jonson's instructive ridicule and his own professed awareness of these limitations, he persisted in staging battle after battle almost to the end of his career. In endorsing his statement of what was wrong with his dramatization of war, we have failed to inquire what was right about it. Principally, I believe, we have neglected to look for the aspect of warfare that steadily interested him and his audience.
Georg Rollenhagen, Sixteenth-Century Playwright, Pedagogue, and Publicist
Authors: Sobel Eli
Published: February 2007

The erudite and industrious Georg Rollenhagen is usually remembered only as author of the Froschmeuseler. Among the authors of the sixteenth century who are accorded at least a paragraph or two in our modern histories of German literature probably none has been so much ignored or become so mistreated a step-child. Study of his life and works reveals a seeming jack-of-all-trades, but he was a master of many. He was a man who spent his life in the narrow limits of a region between Berlin and Magdeburg, yet he created a great school and, more than that, wrote vivid pictures of his time and a long poem, an animal verse-epic, that everybody read.
Iconography on the Nature and Inspiration of Poetry in Renaissance Emblem Literature
Authors: Clements Robert J. , Lewis Arthur O.
Published: February 2007

When Thoughts and prejudices become stereotyped, they seek the fixed expression and convenient reference of a visual symbol. The Renaissance, with its Christian, classic, and neo-Platonic imageries, afforded an excellent demonstration of this. During that period, which enlarged consciously and unconsciously the implications of ut pictura poesis, this imagery could be examined in either the poetry or the painting. Nowhere does one find, however, a more harmonious marriage of artistic and literary metaphor than in the innumerable and popular emblem books of the Renaissance, depositories, as Henri Stegemeier writes, of so many traditions, themes, and opinions both belletristic and bellartistic. These emblemata were the perpetuating vehicles by which neoclassic metaphor was brought to the thousands of Europeans whose only contact with the painting of their time was an occasional glance at the religious figures over the candlelight of their local basilica and whose contact with literature was the sporadic reading of racy novelle or those antecedents of the novels which the Renaissance lumped under the term of “heroic poem.” Everyone read the emblem books, or looked at them, and there were more editions of Alciati in the sixteenth century than there were of Rabelais.
The Meaning of the Middle English Pearl
Authors: Hamilton Marie Padgett
Published: February 2007

A solution to the mystery of Pearl must meet certain tests if it is to answer the questions: What is typified by the jewel and the jewel-maiden, and how are they related? What is the symbolic import of the story? Specifically, as J. P. Oakden has indicated, the gem must stand for something which the poet could represent as a pearl and at the same time as a maiden who had died in infancy and had been redeemed by Christ. Further, says Oakden, it must signify something that the poet (or his protagonist speaking in the first person) “lost, mourned, and could recover through the grace of God, strengthened by partaking of the Blessed Sacrament.”
Beowulf: A Study In Dilatation
Authors: Engelhardt George J.
Published: February 2007

When the author of Beowulf undertook to create in English a secular narrative poem of epic amplitude, he set himself to a task for which there was no precedent in the native tradition. In the Germanic past, narrative poetry had been confined to the heroic lay. This was a short poem, not exceeding some two hundred long-lines. It held to a single action, the sequence of which it presented with abrupt economy. Preoccupied with the scenic and the climactic, it had little leisure for any element which might retard the pace or attenuate the impact. To this tradition, the digressive, the repetitious, and the dilatory were alien. Only in style was the static indulged, in variation, in the ornamental and the vicarious epithet, and here only with restraint.
Eras in English Poetry
Authors: Miles Josephine
Published: February 2007

This is a proposal to consider the periods of English poetic history on the basis of characteristic modes of sentence structure and on the pattern of their sequence.
The “Missing” Leaf of the Skeireins under Ultraviolet Radiation
Authors: Bennett William H.
Published: February 2007

Five leaves of the Skeireins (I, II, V, VI, VII) are in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, where they form Cod. E 147 parte superiore, 4° maj. Leaf VI, which bears the Arabic page numbers 309–310, disappeared from the codex at some time in the course of World War II, probably in 1943. In August of that year Milan underwent three successive nights of heavy bombing, in which thirteen halls of the Ambrosiana were destroyed, ten others damaged, and some 80,000 volumes burned beyond recognition. Fortunately, the Ambrosian Gothic palimpsests were rushed to safety and so escaped the fate of the Giessen document. In 1948 the Ambrosiana provided the writer with fluorescent type ultraviolet photographs of I, II, V, and VII but reported that VI was missing or misplaced. In 1950 a decipherment of I, II, V, and VII was published, followed in 1954 by a reading of the Vatican leaves (III, IV, VIII), but the absence of VI still precluded any attempt to complete the study of the manuscript. Finally, in 1955 it became possible to examine the Skeireins fragments in Vatican City and Milan, and, at the same time, to look for the missing leaf. Leaf VI proved to be misplaced in Cod. Ambros. A. How it came there is a matter for conjecture, but the haste and confusion produced by the 1943 bombing may well account for the misplacement.
Poems by “My Lord R.”: Rochester versus Radclyffe
Authors: Vieth David M.
Published: February 2007

Among the many poems doubtfully attributed to John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, is a group of seven lyrics which challenges attention because it poses problems of authorship that have continued to baffle Rochester's editors and biographers. These lyrics are linked not only by rather evident stylistic similarities but, more importantly, by the fact that in various early texts all seven are said to be “by my Ld. R.” Their attribution to Rochester appears, indeed, to rest solely on the premise that he is this enigmatic “my Ld. R.,” a premise accepted both by contemporary observers and by twentieth-century scholars. Investigation of the available evidence reveals, however, that such an assumption is scarcely warranted. The poems in question, which I number for reference, include (1) “A Song” (“While in Divine Panthea's Charming Eyes”), (2) “A Song” (“Pity, Fair Sapho, one that dies”), (3) “A Psean, or Song of Triumph, on the Translation and Apotheosis of King Charles the Second” (“0 Muse, to whom the Glory does belong”), (4) “Out of Horace” (“While I was Monarch of your Heart”), (5) “Cornelius Gallus Imitated. A Lyrick” (“My Goddess, Lydia, Heav'nly Fair”), (6) “Apollo's Grief, For having Kill'd Hyacinth by Accident. In Imitation of Ovid” (“Sweet Hyacinth, my Life! my Joy”), and (7) “Song” (“Where is he gone whom I Adore”).
Swinburne on “The Music of Poetry”
Authors: Connolly Thomas E.
Published: February 2007

More than any other critic of his day, Algernon Charles Swinburne judged poetry by its music, but, because Swinburne is so often ignored as a critic, much of what he had to say on this most elusive subject remains buried in his involved critical prose. Yet, what Swinburne had to say about the music of poetry is often instructive, for one so renowned for musical effects in his own poetry demands our attention when he discusses this subject.
Pearl: 1850–1955
Authors: Garlitz Barbara
Published: February 2007

Pearl would seem to be the most enigmatic child in literature. Soon after The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850 Pearl was called both “an imbodied angel from the skies” and “a void little demon,” and time produced no unanimity of opinion. In the past hundred years she has been variously described as “most artificial and unchildlike,” and as possessing “the natural bloom… of childhood,” as a creature “of moral indifference, as one not born into the moral order,” and as an illustration of “that law which visits the sins of the fathers upon the children.” For some critics she performs the function of “a symbolized conscience,” but for others she is simply “a darksome fairy” or “the one touch of color in a sombre picture.” To one writer she typifies “a disordered nature torn by a malignant conflict between the forces of good and evil,” but to another she is an example of Rousseauian natural goodness. In the past five years Pearl has been found a symbol both of “unnatural isolation” from society and of the organicism of nature as opposed to the mechanism of society, a symbol both of the id and of “man's hopeful future.” Several critics have called Pearl a child of nature, but to one she is a symbol of wild uncivilized nature outside the realm of grace, to another an example of prelapsarian innocence, and to a third “an object of natural beauty, a flower,” and like nature, amoral, “not good or bad, because… not responsible.” Criticism of Pearl almost forces one to conclude that her character is an unfathomable maze, or of such an involved richness that it can become all things to all men.
Robert Louis Stevenson's Musical Interests
Authors: Stevenson Robert
Published: February 2007

“Robert Louis Stevenson's earliest preserved efforts at musical composition are contained in two manuscript books owned by the Huntington Library in California and date from his thirty-first year, the year Treasure Island was completed. But almost a decade earlier he confessed that music had already become his ”consuming passion.“ From Frankfort in 1872 he had written home telling of his ”terrible excitement“ at a performance of Halévy's La Juive, and adding: “An opera is far more real than real life to me… It seems as if… opera would never stale upon me.” The next winter back in Edinburgh he heard his first Beethoven quartet, and with typical impetuosity forsook his love of opera for other loves. Later he was to write from Saranac Lake: “Wealth is only useful for two things—a yacht and a string quartette. For these two I will sell my soul. Except for these, I hold that £700 a year is as much as anybody can possibly want.”
The Theme and Structure of Faulkner's The Hamlet
Authors: Greet T. Y.
Published: February 2007

William Faulkner's novel The Hamlet has received less critical attention and, perhaps, less critical intelligence than any other of his major works. The reasons for this neglect are rather easily stated. Published in 1940, Faulkner's only significant novel between Absalom, Absalom! in 1936 and Go Down, Moses in 1942, The Hamlet differs considerably from the novels of the “major phase,” 1929–1936. It comes at a point in the development of the Yoknapatawpha Cycle when the early conflict between legend and reality which so disturbed Quentin Compson had been largely resolved, and it is concerned with themes that had earlier been of peripheral interest. It presents as protagonists a class of Yoknapatawphans who are relative newcomers to the cycle. These things together—the lessening of tension and the utilization of new material—are reflected in the unique tone of The Hamlet, which led Malcolm Cowley to entitle his review of the novel “Faulkner By Daylight.” Further, since the novel is leisurely in its narrative method and relatively lucid in its style, it does not at first glance seem to demand or merit the sort of exhaustive readings which have been given, say, to The Sound and the Fury. Finally, with the major exception of Robert Penn Warren, almost none of the critics has been willing to recognize the book as a novel at all. Cowley speaks of its structure as that of “beads on a string.” John Arthos calls the book Faulkner's “most remarkable writing” but adds that it “falls into at least four separate stories… there is no real unity.” O'Connor, Howe, Campbell and Foster have all dealt with and appreciated various aspects of the novel but it remains the chief enigma of the cycle.
Then and Now
Authors: Pound Louise
Published: February 2007

Hope this microphone works. If you have to listen to me I hope you can hear me. Once before at a gathering of a learned society, seeing an upright gadget before me, I talked with extreme care directly into it for half an hour, moving neither to the right nor to the left, only to find as I went down from the platform that it was a lamp.
Things in Recent French Literature
Authors: Loy J. Robert
Published: February 2007

Since the second world war, journalistic critics and generalizing cultural pundits have been pointing out to us that serious French literature is headed, on the one hand, toward an eventually sterile period of realistic despair, and, on the other, toward an intensification of difficult writing characterized by a kind of supreme indifference to audience on the part of the creator. Examples to prove their point are not lacking. There would seem to be, however, at least one other trend in recent French writing which, although owing something, perhaps, in the way of formation or occasion for reaction to the two types mentioned, falls not at all into such categories. For lack of a better name, and in order to avoid painful jargon, this literature might best be called a literature of Things.
El Testamento Poético de Antonio Machado
Authors: Gicovate Bernardo
Published: February 2007

Quizá porque las ideas estéticas de Abel Martín han ofrecido mejor oportunidad al crítico y al estudioso o quizà por las dificultades inherentes a toda poesía, el hecho es que los poemas publicados en De un cancionero apócrifo no han recibido todavía la debida atención. Pero precisamente porque sabía Machado con exactitud consciente el derrotero de la poesía, la de sus últimos años es màs certera y acertada. Y nunca màs que en “Recuerdos de sueño, fiebre y duermivela,” un poema de extraña complejidad que se había publicado por separado en la Revista de Occidente del mes de noviembre de 1931. Las preocupaciones estéticas de la prosa de Machado afloran en sus últimos versos que desarrollan a veces los conceptos filosóficos de Abel Martín y Juan de Mairena, quienes habían asimilado a su vez no pocas de las intuiciones del juvenil Antonio Machado. Pero “Recuerdos de sueño, fiebre y duermivela” no trata de definir lo poético, sino de senalar y dibujar los contomos de la poesía del autor.
Early Vestiges of Joyce's Ulysses
Authors: Litz Walton
Published: February 2007

No Writer ever revised more carefully or used his rough notes and sketches more economically than Joyce. Each work grows out of its predecessor and prepares the way for a succeeding work already contemplated. Ulysses was first conceived as a short story for Dubliners, the Portrait is a prologue to Ulysses, and many of the themes and characters of Finnegans Wake are adumbrated in the earlier works. Even Chamber Music, which appears to be unrelated to Joyce's great achievements, can be shown to foreshadow the action of A Portrait and to hold the key to many passages in Ulysses and the Wake. There is a sense in which one can say that James Joyce wrote only one book, a continuous effort to endow his own life and the Dublin of his youth with a universal significance. T. S. Eliot has emphasized this continuity in his foreword to the catalogue of the 1949 Joyce exhibition in Paris: “Joyce's writings form a whole; we can neither reject the early work as stages, of no intrinsic interest, of his progress towards the latter, nor reject the later work as the outcome of decline. As with Shakespeare, his later work must be understood through the earlier, and the first through the last; it is the whole journey, not any one stage of it, that assures him his place among the great.”
Hawthorne, Bunyan, and the American Romances
Authors: Stanton Robert
Published: February 2007

One can hardly complain that too few scholars have examined the influence of John Bunyan upon Nathaniel Hawthorne. George Parsons Lathrop's A Study of Hawthorne and F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance give excellent if brief discussions, each of which identifies several of Hawthorne's allusions to the English allegorist. The most detailed examination is W. Stacy Johnson's “Hawthorne and The Pilgrim's Progress,” in which Johnson, after establishing Hawthorne's familiarity with The Pilgrim's Progress, points out several allusions to it in the short stories and romances, discusses Bunyan's influence upon Hawthorne's allegorical techniques, and concludes that “The Pilgrim's Progress is a major source and inspiration for the art of Hawthorne.”
Dickens and Lewes
Authors: Haight Gordon S.
Published: February 2007

No reader of John Forster's Life would suspect that Dickens was a good friend of George Henry Lewes for thirty-two years, almost as long as he knew Forster himself. In the first two volumes of the book Lewes' name is mentioned only twice, once in the cast of a play, and once in a page-long list of “other acquaintances”: “Mr. George Henry Lewes he had an old and great regard for; among other men of letters should not be forgotten the cordial Thomas Ingoldsby.… ” J. W. T. Ley, the editor of Forster's Life of Dickens, thought that this shabby allusion was inserted to placate Lewes,

who had certainly been a friend of Dickens, but whose aid had been utterly rejected in the writing of this book. Lewes was certainly offended at Forster's determination to rely wholly upon his own knowledge of Dickens. Wilkie Collins was offended, too, and there were others who, in Dickens's lifetime and afterwards, resented the way in which Forster was apt to arrogate the novelist all to himself. There never was a more jealous friend than Forster. There are no records of the friendship with Lewes. He and Dickens were on excellent terms always, but there were no “intimacies of friendship.” Lewes's article in the Fortnightly Review in 1871 [i.e., 1872] showed that he did not understand Dickens, that he viewed him with eyes that saw only externals. He took part in some of the theatricals, (p. 544)
Ovid, Juvenal, and The Silent Woman
Authors: Barish Jonas A.
Published: February 2007

Epicene, or The Silent Woman, which Jonson's own century admired perhaps more than any other of his plays, has suffered the fate of becoming more instead of less enigmatic as time passes. Recent critics, more bothered than Jonson's contemporaries over the question of what, finally, the play is all about, have drifted into debates over whether it is a comedy or a farce, whether it is moral or immoral (or amoral), whether its prevailing tone is one of gaiety or harshness. One can lump many of these questions together and rephrase them in terms of Jonson's own dramatic development by asking to what extent Epicene preserves the stern morality of the earlier plays and to what extent it shares the geniality and relaxed moral temper of the later plays as typified by Bartholomew Fair. Probably the answer is that as a transitional play it combines both, and not always in the happiest fashion. The gaiety skates uncomfortably close to sadism; the judicial sternness, rejected in the person of Morose, is rejected with such supererogatory fierceness that it attracts a strong countercurrent of sympathy to it. The victory of Truewit over Morose represents Jonson's attempt to assert the values of the world and the flesh over the consolations of philosophy. But Jonson is still too committed to the philosopher's study to abandon it casually, and still too repelled by the vanity of courts to embrace it without a shudder. The result is that what he attempts to affirm on one level he denies on another. The effort to substitute an indulgent, “realistic” account of the world in place of his more habitual and more deeply felt satirical view produces ambiguities of tone which trouble the whole structure of the play.
The Eminent Dignity of Literature
Authors: Chinard Gilbert
Published: February 2007

It is unnecessary to remind this learned audience that the title of this paper was borrowed from the eloquent sermon of Bossuet, delivered almost three hundred years ago, on “The Eminent Dignity of the Poor in the Church.” My feeble voice cannot emulate the majestic periods of the great orator. My only ambition is, in a familiar sermon, to define the position granted to our studies in modern society,—a position somewhat similar to that of the poor in the aristocratic society of the seventeenth century. My purpose is to claim for them the eminent dignity which belongs to them, and to justify the recognition they should obtain at least in academic circles.
Montaigne on the Dignity of Man
Authors: Keller Abraham C.
Published: February 2007

The question of the dignity of man and his place in the universe was much discussed in the Renaissance. With an inflated idea of their departure from medieval tradition, the thinkers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries tried hard to arrive at a new, “humanistic,” evaluation of man. We know now, of course, that their departure was not as sharp as they thought and that certain traditional arguments persisted in one form or another. Herschel Baker, in his study, The Dignity of Man, published in 1947, showed the persistence of some themes and the introduction of others, especially in the Neoplatonic and Protestant thinkers. It is the purpose of this article to examine the way in which the question was handled by Montaigne, who was up to date in his readings on the subject and who had the advantage of coming at the end of the Continental Renaissance; to determine the extent of his departure from tradition, the paths which he followed in his thinking, and the degree of independence which he exercised. Since man is the central subject of the Essais, Montaigne's opinions are likely to be well thought out and carefully formulated. The material presented here can hardly be new; it is the sweep and originality of Montaigne's views that need to be pointed out.'
The Structure of Chenier's L'Invention
Authors: Cherpack Clifton
Published: February 2007

It is not surprising that André Chénier's poem L'Invention has been much discussed, and that the discussion has been conducted almost exclusively along the lines of literary history. To begin with, this poem excited the greatest attention on the part of critics and scholars in the heyday of the historical method. Secondly, it is, or seems to be, a poetic manifesto, containing doctrines and ideas which lend themselves to consideration in abslraclo. Thirdly, this manifesto is uniquely provocative of historical and comparative analyses since it appears to mark a turning away of the poet from the aesthetic which characterizes the bulk of his extant work, and to herald the composition of important new works which exist only in disappointing fragments. Thus, the reader who follows the tortuous course of Chénier criticism plotted by Paul Glachant and who has read Paul Dimoff's more recent study, finds raised over and over again, in connection with L'Invention, questions which have little to do with the poem considered as a poem. Was Chénier the last of the classicists, the critics and scholars ask, or was he the first of the romanticists? Did he have two manières, or three, or one which could be pulled inside out and only appear different, like a reversible garment? If Hermès and L'Amérique, the poems which L'Invention seems to foreshadow, had been completed, would they have been masterful epics, or epic failures? These questions, and others like them, are discussed at length, but only rarely and negligently do the students of L'Invention hint that it is itself a poem and not merely a discursive recipe for the writing of poetry. Yet, L'Invention obviously is a poem in spite of its doctrinal “message,” and as such must be read with an eye for those poetic principles which should inform it, which should guarantee its organic unity, its formal autonomy. Such a literary reading must be the basis for any discussion of the ideas contained in the poem.
A View of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
Authors: Stock Irvin
Published: February 2007

An enthusiasm for this novel is not, nowadays, an easy thing to share. Unless one moves in circles professionally devoted to German literature, the mention of its title is likely to call up among literary people the following notions: that T. S. Eliot has not approved of Goethe, while nineteenth-century England did, both facts still, to many, rather discouraging; that the Bildungsroman, of which Goethe's novel is the great example, is a sloppy and self-indulgent genre—there is no form, since it just goes autobiographically on and on, nor any proper commitment to experience, which the self-obsessed hero only passes through; that this one might be full of “wisdom,” perhaps, but that here is precisely its greatest fault, for what can wisdom be but smug “Victorian” moralizing or analyzing or generalizing, mere simplifying abstraction at best, and the death of all actuality, complexity, and charm. Nor is it fashion alone which accounts for the novel's virtual disappearance from our intellectual landscape. No, even when it is read it tends to be disliked. Press it on the up-to-date intelligent reader, the reader who devours the Russians or Stendhal or Flaubert or Proust with joy, and more often than not—such has been my experience—he will find it repulsively cold-blooded, even frivolous, in its treatment of human affairs. It is sometimes admitted that what happens in the novel, at least after the rather long flash-back at the beginning, ought to be interesting enough. But, the complaint is, one is hurried through even the big scenes at a pace that is shockingly sprightly. There is no sign that the author feels anything or wants us to feel anything. One is hurried on, moreover, to no particular purpose. Instead of “adding up,” the story rambles in the most outmoded way. And so forth.
Goethe's Dramatic Use of Music
Authors: Morgan Bayard Quincy
Published: February 2007

Despite all the vast amount of paper and ink devoted to the topic headed “Goethe and Music,”—and students of the subject may well be impressed to learn that Calvin Brown, after checking the extensive bibliography of this field recently issued in book form by Frederick Sternfeld, found some seventy titles in his own file which were not in Sternfeld's list—despite all this erudition and toil, there is one little angle of the subject which appears to have been overlooked. And yet it seems to me more eloquent of Goethe's originality of mind than most of what has been printed regarding his relation to music.
De Quincey Revises His Confessions
Authors: Jack Ian
Published: February 2007

While the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater may be found in innumerable editions, what is usually reprinted is the revised text which De Quincey prepared for a collection of his principal writings in the last years of his life. It is well known that this version of the book differs greatly from the original, and some of the differences have from time to time been pointed out; yet no one has gone to the trouble of comparing the two in any detail. The result has been some inaccurate literary history. It is important to know whether a book was written in the time of Scott and Byron or in that of Dickens and Tennyson. What is more, a comparison of the two forms of the Confessions throws a great deal of light on De Quincey's development. Only by the publication of a two-text edition could all the differences be pointed out; but since an accurate reprint of the 1822 text has recently appeared, while the revised text of 1856 is readily accessible, this hardly seems called for. Instead, I shall here confine myself to indicating the main differences between the two forms of the book—that of 45,000 words and that of 90,000.
Le Bateau Ivre, or the Limits of Symbolism
Authors: Weinberg Bernard
Published: February 2007

Perhaps no other French poem of recent times has been so much discussed, commented on, and analyzed as Arthur Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre. Hence it may seem presumptuous on my part to propose to the reader another lengthy discussion of a work about which “everything has been said.” If I do so, it is because of a conviction that much remains still to be said. For whereas there have been proposals for the total reading of the poem which seem to be generally acceptable, these usually fail to do more than suggest the broad general meaning; they do not provide insights into specific passages or solutions to the many difficulties of detail. Moreover, they tend to concentrate on the problem of meaning to the exclusion of the problem of structure, and it is in the problem of structure that I am especially interested. I should wish to discover, in the following pages, not only a more nearly complete reading of Le Bateau Ivre but also the answer (or part of the answer) to a theoretical question that constantly arises in the analysis of symbolist poetry. The problem simply stated is this: How much of a symbolist poem is actually involved in the central symbol about which the poem is built, and what purpose is served by such parts of the poem as are not involved in that symbol? Hence my subtitle, “The Limits of Symbolism,” which does not mean to impose limits upon the poet or to suggest that any such exist in the nature of things, but merely to inquire into the operation of these limits in the case of Le Bateau Ivre.
The German Elements in Bécquer's Rimas
Authors: Orton Graham
Published: February 2007

Writers of genius inevitably impel us to seek the sources of their inspiration. This is more than idle curiosity, for we cannot otherwise assess their originality. But when a great poet stands apparently without roots in the literary tradition of his country, the urge to ascertain the influences which moulded him becomes unusually intense. So must we explain the bias of Bécquer studies ever since the first publication of the collected Rimas in 1871. For some sixty years the debate centered almost exclusively round the question of Bécquer's debt to Heine. But other poets lurked in the background. Isolated contacts with Musset, Schiller, and Anastasius Grün were noted long ago. In 1931 the field was widened when W. S. Hendrix sought to prove that Byron, not Heine, exercised an appreciable influence on the Rimas, while in the last twenty years Spanish and Latin-American scholars have begun to investigate more thoroughly the Spanish element in his work.
Whitman's “Calamus”: The Leaf and the Root
Authors: Miller James E.
Published: February 2007

No section in Leaves of Grass has received so much close attention and been the center of so much discussion and controversy as “Calamus.” Friends of Whitman, particularly the “hot little prophets,” have indignantly defended the section against the charge of “indecency,” usually by raising the opposite cry, “purity,” and by citing Whitman's own saintlike, spiritual life as proof that the poems could not be unwholesome. William Sloane Kennedy calls “Calamus” “Whitman's beautiful democratic poems of friendship” and adds, “A genuine lover speaks in the Calamus pieces: a great and generous heart there pours forth its secret. Set side by side with these glowing confessions, other writings on friendship seem frigid and calculating.” At the opposite extreme is Mark Van Doren's recent judgment which has been widely influential: “His [Whitman's] democratic dogmas—of what validity are they when we consider that they base themselves upon the sentiment of ‘manly love,‘ and that manly love is neither more nor less than an abnormal and deficient love?” To the serious reader of “Calamus,” the “manly love” which recurs both as a term and an idea is of such genuine poetic complexity as to render it a good deal more than “abnormal” and considerably less than “deficient.”
Here was a Caesar: Shaw's Comedy Today
Authors: Couchman Gordon W.
Published: February 2007

When, in 1908, in answer to reviewers who dismissed Caesar and Cleopatra as opéra bouffe, Bernard Shaw prophesied to his Julius, Forbes-Robertson, “In 1920 Caesar will be a masterpiece,” he might safely have written “1950” instead. The little editorial note prefixed to the American edition of Three Plays for Puritans (1906), informing us (incorrectly) that Caesar had at that date never been produced and “perhaps could not be” (p. xl), has long since proved absurdly overmodest. Three performances within the last decade have demonstrated that in the theatre no less than in the library Shaw's unique blend of wit and insight is more keenly relished than ever. Moreover, whether or not we agree with Shaw that in Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare reversed the Circean formula and turned hogs into heroes (Works, p. xxx), we cannot deny that half a century of Hollywood “love-interest” has been sufficient to make Shaw's comedy doubly welcome as, in Sir Max Beerbohm's phrase, “a man's play.”