bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Emily Dickinson's Poetic Vocabulary
Authors: Howard William
Published: February 2007

Emily Dickinson's poetic vocabulary has been variously described as being “a small, rigidly compartmented vocabulary of general and conventional groups of terms, plus a moderately capacious vocabulary of homely, acute, directly felt words from which the whole actualizing strength of her verse is drawn”; as being a “large vocabulary including many rare words and some of her own manufacture”; and as being “undeniably rich, subtle, and strikingly original.” Much of the discussion of her vocabulary has been based upon the impressions of individual commentators and not upon an objective survey of her vocabulary as a whole, but the appearance in 1951 of a concordance to the poems of the Amherst poet in print at that time and the recent publication of the definitive edition of her poems that includes all of the known Dickinson material have made possible a detailed study of her entire vocabulary which furnishes a factual basis for conclusions as to her verbal habits. Such a study shows that the words on which a great deal of critical attention has been focused form only a small part of her total vocabulary and that her so-called favorite words are far from being her favorites on the basis of frequency of occurrence, findings that raise the question of whether the emphasis on those words is that of the poet or of the critics. Such a study also makes it possible to compare the Dickinson vocabulary with those of other poets and thus to determine in what ways she is unique in the words she uses and in what ways she conforms to patterns established by other poets. This discussion is based upon the results of such a study, and, in view of the comments that have been made on her vocabulary, it falls rather naturally into three parts: (1) the isolation and analysis of the more unusual words used by Dickinson, (2) the discussion of her “favorite” words, and (3) the comparison of her most frequently used words with those used most often by one hundred English poets from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. In general, it may be said that the findings show that Emily Dickinson's habits in the choice of words are similar to those of other poets and that her success or failure as a poet cannot be attributed to the use of an exotic or special vocabulary.
The Trials of the Epic Hero in Beowulf
Authors: Fisher Peter F.
Published: February 2007

The unity of Beowulf is at least secure in the person of the hero whose character and actions provide the basis for any critical examination of structure and theme. According to some, this is all that holds the epic together. Others see more than a sequence of disconnected episodes related to one person. In their view, the fights with Grendel and his dam are united to the dragon fight in the opposition of hero and king, youth and age, the beginning and ending of a life of achievement. It is in their spirit that I have attempted to take a fresh view of the subject with special reference to unity of theme and treatment. The suggestion is that this unity is to be found in the theme of redemption and judgment treated in a way which skilfully blends the Germanic hero with the Christian saint. The symbolism is not regarded as contrived or studied, but rather as of that kind which is the usual result of an author's finding an apt subject to illustrate his theme. A symbolic interpretation does not, after all, exclude a literal interpretation; it contains it. The dragon, for instance, can be both a universal symbol and a very literal and particular monster. We have surely become too literal-minded if we suppose that the audience of Beowulf could see no universal significance in the epic story because they accepted the literal truth of the narrative. The many symbolical interpretations of the Biblical narrative during the period which followed bear witness to the improbability of this view. Once the underlying theme of redemption and judgment is adopted and is seen to be the epic theme par excellence, the process of selection from myth and legend becomes somewhat clearer, and there is no longer the necessity to account for a gap between the Grendel fights and the dragon fight. The details in the fifty-year reign of the hero would have been irrelevant. An epic is surely not a biography nor a chronicle nor a mythology, although it draws upon all these.
The Dates of Milton's Sonnets on Blindness
Authors: Parker William R.
Published: February 2007

The dates assigned to Milton's two sonnets on his blindness have depended upon our dating of the time when blindness became “total.” It is the purpose of this essay to qualify this premise, to propose revision of all the dates now usually accepted, and, not incidentally, to urge a possibly new interpretation of a passage in one of the sonnets.
Studies in Three Arnold Problems
Authors: Buckler William E.
Published: February 2007

It is more and more frequently said that we need a critical edition of Matthew Arnold's prose works. Not that a sense of this need is of recent origin. The late E. K. Brown made note of it more than twenty years ago in the Preface to his pioneering Studies in the Text of Matthew Arnold's Prose Works (Paris, 1935); and before that, though with a considerably different emphasis, J. Dover Wilson, in the Editor's Preface to his edition of Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge, 1932), had pointed up the “surprises” which lie in store for readers of the first edition of Arnold's “Essay in Political & Social Criticism” who have known the book only from texts which have incorporated the author's revisions for the second edition of 1875. We now have a fine critical edition of the poetry (ed. Tinker and Lowry, Oxford, 1950), and we are, I think, coming very near to the time when a critical and definitive edition of the prose will be possible. Unpublished letters are being turned up and printed, anonymous contributions are being identified, and we are learning more and more about the developmental history of Arnold's books. In the first part of this article, then, I wish to add some new information and a new speculation or two about the evolution and text of Arnold's major effort at social criticism, Culture and A narchy.
James Joyce's “Tilly”
Authors: Anderson Chester G.
Published: February 2007

In the introduction to his definitive edition of Chamber Music (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1954) William York Tindall has shown us clearly that Joyce's poems are not so clear nor so “slight” as we once thought they were. One of the most enigmatic is “Tilly,” the opening poem of Pomes Penyeach. The best poem in that disappointing book, it has, like the rest of Joyce's work, one of its sources in Joyce's biography; and in part we can recover this source from Stephen Hero, the first attempt at A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “Ruminants,” a hitherto unprinted early version of the poem, provides interesting insights into Joyce's technique as a versifier, and a study of the meaning of “Tilly” in relation to the Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake is fascinating for the dim light it throws on Joyce's progressively indirect and intricate handling of his themes.
Parts of Speech in Periods of Poetry
Authors: Kroeber A. L.
Published: February 2007

It WAS Josephine Miles's “Eras in English Poetry,” published in this journal in September 1955 (LXX, 853-875), that stimulated me to study her method, to appraise her findings, and, finally, to endeavor to carry farther and perhaps to sharpen her approach. This paper reports such findings and such conclusions as have, thus far, eventuated from this endeavor.
Gascoigne's “Master F.J.” as Original Fiction
Authors: Adams Robert P.
Published: February 2007

George Gascoigne was more than “the first conscious purist in his art.” With wit and energy he sought to solve a wide range of urgent Elizabethan literary problems. To his credit stand the first English prose comedy, translation of the first tragedy from the Italian, the first mask and regular English satire, the first critical English treatment of prosody.
“Like Race to Runne”: The Parallel Structure of the Faerie Queene, Books I and II
Authors: Hamilton A. C.
Published: February 2007

My Purpose in this paper is to understand the allegory of The Faerie Queene more fully by examining the relation between the first two books. It has been commonly observed that these books are parallel in structure. In each, the Knight who represents a particular virtue (Holiness, Temperance) leaves the court of the Faery Queen with a guide (Una, the Palmer), and later defeats two chief antagonists (Sansfoy and Sans-joy, Pyrochles and Cymochles); upon being separated from his guide, he enters a place of temptation (the house of Pride, the cave of Mammon), and later falls. Then being rescued by Arthur and united with his guide, he enters a place of instruction (the house of Holiness, the castle of Alma) and finally fulfills his adventure (killing the Dragon, destroying the Bower of Bliss). Such paralleling has been considered part of Spenser's design expressed in the Letter to Ralegh, to write twelve books in which twelve knights, as patrons of the twelve virtues, undertake parallel adventures assigned by the Faery Queen. That the later books do not follow this repetitive structure has been variously explained as the need to avoid monotony, to modify the design according to the virtue being treated, or simply—all too simply—as a change of plan. It was left to A. S. P. Woodhouse to explain for the first time the basis of the parallel structure of the first two books. He suggests that the two orders of nature and grace which were universally accepted as a frame of reference in the Renaissance are here carefully differentiated: “what touches the Redcross Knight bears primarily upon revealed religion, or belongs to the order of grace; whatever touches Guyon bears upon natural ethics, or belongs to the order of nature” (p. 204). It follows that the parallel structure is designed to bring into relief differences which depend upon these two orders. He finds that this difference leaves its mark chiefly upon the education received by the two knights: the Redcross knight shows the bankruptcy of natural man who must utterly depend upon heavenly grace whereas Guyon shows how natural man realizes the potentialities of his nature by ruling his passions through reason (pp. 205-206). At times, he insists more strongly than does Spenser upon an absolute separation of the two orders: Guyon's reference to “the sacred badge of my Redeemers death” confuses the separation, as does the Palmer's benediction: “God guide thee, Guyon, well to end thy warke.” Even more confusing is Guyon's invocation to Christ for His Mercy at the moment when, like Longinus, he levels his spear against the Cross: “Mercie Sir knight, and mercie Lord, / For mine offence and heedlesse hardiment, / That had almost committed crime abhord” (ii.i.27). However, thanks to Woodhouse's article, there seems no doubt now that the distinction between the two orders of nature and grace provides a necessary frame of reference for understanding the parallel structure of the first two books.
Swift Marginalia in Howell's Medulla Historiae Anglicanae
Authors: Manley Francis
Published: February 2007

On 29 May 1736, Doctor Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's, presented to Mistress Mary Harrison a copy of Medulla Historiae Anglicanae: The Ancient and Present State of England. Being a Compendious History of All Its Monarchs,from the Time of Julius Caesar. Written by Dr. Howell. And continued by an Impartial Hand to the Death of His late Majesty King George I (9th ed., London, 1734), in order to “encourage her to read usefull and improving Books.” Such high sententiousness is probably a suitable pose for a man almost seventy to assume when formally endowing a girl in her mid-twenties with an epitome of English history. Yet even at seventy Swift would have enjoyed placing an ironic inscription on the flyleaf of a book, especially one like Howell's, biased by Whiggery; and if Mistress Harrison ever read this improving volume, she would have discovered some of Swift's characteristic marginal vituperation. Since these notes have never been printed, few people besides Mary Harrison have had the opportunity these past two hundred years of reading Swift's animadversions on certain aspects of English history.
The Eldorado Episode in Candide
Authors: Bottiglia William F.
Published: February 2007

Aliterary analysis of the Eldorado episode in Candide should undertake to answer three interlocking questions: (1) What is its philosophic meaning in relation to the whole? (2) By what artistic devices is that meaning conveyed? (3) How successfully has Voltaire fused form and substance? To date no such analysis exists. Questions 2 and 3 have been handled either scantly or not at all. Question 1, while much more frequently and for the most part satisfactorily treated, has in a few instances produced divergent interpretations springing from divergencies of critical approach. It is the purpose of this essay to elaborate an analysis of the episode which will, among other things, provide a standard for evaluating the partial answers thus far offered.
Symbol and Reality in Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market
Authors: Packer Lona Mosk
Published: February 2007

In common with other such enduring works of art as The Faery Queen, Gulliver's Travels, and Alice in Wonderland, Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market has many levels of meaning. At the narrative level it offers a charming and delicate fairy tale to delight a child—if a somewhat precocious one. At the symbolic and allegorical level, it conveys certain Christian ethical assumptions. At the psychological level, it suggests emotional experience universally valid.
The Metamorphoses of David Garnett
Authors: Irwin W. R.
Published: February 2007

David Garnett achieved a triumphal entry into the citadel of fiction with two short fantasies, Lady into Fox (1922) and A Man in the Zoo (1924). The former was awarded the James Tait Black Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. The latter was welcomed by eagerly waiting reviewers, who expressed their delight that he could follow a tour de force, the most dangerous of beginnings, with a work showing intellectual solidity and range as well as virtuosity. Both books have kept their places of esteem in modern fiction.
Philosophia Regina
Authors: Oates Whitney J.
Published: February 2007

Mr. Chairman, President Fred, President Starck, ladies and gentlemen of the Modern Language Association: I suppose on this occasion, as a member of the American Philological Association, I should be tempted to reflect upon the event in the year of the great schism, 1883, when forty youthful modern linguists, smarting under the tyranny of classical philology, struck their historic blow for freedom, and formed the Modern Language Association. Suffice it to say that after years of rivalry, we have all come to the realization that we are allies in a common cause, not only within the conventional humanities but also with our colleagues in the other areas of learning. No doubt the sense of kinship between classicists and scholars in the modern foreign languages has been enhanced by the experience of adversity. Certainly a classicist has had to learn to live with, and ultimately profit from, a perpetual “bear” market. But, happily, in recent years, the whole strategy of fighting defensive rear-guard actions has been abandoned, and a new spirit of confidence has appeared. A case in point is William R. Parker's excellent piece entitled “Why a Foreign Language Requirement?” There are also the many classicists who have sworn a mighty oath never again to utter a word of apology for the classics, but rather to start from the assumption that any intelligent and sensible man knows how important they are.
On the OHG Isidor and Its Significance for Early German Prose Writings
Authors: Nordmeyer George
Published: February 2007

The literary register of the German-speaking peoples begins with awkward eighth-century attempts at glossing Latin texts and dictionaries, followed by sundry pieces of translation of mostly catechumenal character, culminating toward the end of the century in the OHG Isidor. For previous generations of German philologists these earliest writing efforts in the German vernacular were of interest and value primarily as attestations of an early period of the language. Twentieth-century research, however, under the vigorous leadership of Georg Baesecke, has tried to assess their import for the history of German literature as the first manifestations of an indigenous literary culture, modest in its beginnings, tortuous in its course, but of a potential vitality that failed of realization only because of unfavorable external circumstances.
Political Allusions in Dryden's Later Plays
Authors: Moore John Robert
Published: February 2007

There have been two different interpretations of Dryden's attitude toward church and state in his writings after the Revolution of 1688–89. Some have held that he would gladly have changed with the times but was unacceptable to the new regime because he was too notorious an offender; others, that he chose with silent dignity a relatively obscure place among the defeated minority.
The Divided Tradition of English Criticism
Authors: Madden William A.
Published: February 2007

Except for several lengthy essays by certain of Arnold's worried contemporaries and scattered comments in out-of-the-way essays by later critics, no careful examination has ever been made of Arnold's religious views. It was not until 1930, when T. S. Eliot turned his attention to Arnold in an essay significantly treating Arnold's religious and aesthetic ideas together, that the long-neglected theological bearings of modern criticism were brought out into the open. Subsequently, Lionel Trilling made a more exhaustive criticism of Arnold's religious experience, but without clearly establishing its relation to Arnold's literary experience. In an effort to treat in detail what Eliot briefly touched on in his essay, I have tried elsewhere to show that Arnold's religious ideas changed in important ways during his life and that these changes affected his literary theory and practice. Religious and poetic ideas, which to later and more logical minds seemed hardly consistent with one another hung together in suspension in Arnold's mind, and as a result his work, taken as a whole, contains both Christian and non-Christian, romantic and nonromantic notions that have since his death been set against one another in the divided tradition which underlies modern English criticism.
Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and the Speyers: A Report on an Unpublished Correspondence
Authors: Stern Guy
Published: February 2007

In the summer of 1896 or ‘97 Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his father, Dr. Hugo Hofmannsthal, were sitting in a train bound for Bad Fusch, a small resort in the Austrian Alps and the favorite vacation spot of the Hofmannsthals. Sitting in the same compartment with them were four attractive young ladies whose pleasing demeanor prompted the poet's father to exclaim, in English: “Nice girls!” “Yes,” answered the poet, “but there are too many of them!” The Hofmannsthals’ attempt to be discreet was unsuccessful; the girls' blushes and giggles attested to their proficiency in English. Introductions and a lengthy conversation followed; they marked the beginning of a long acquaintance between the Hofmannsthal family and the four daughters of Hofrat Dr. Albert Speyer.
The Unity of Faulkner's Light in August
Authors: Holman C. Hugh
Published: February 2007

The nature of the unity in William Faulkner's Light in August, in fact, even the existence of such unity, has been seriously disputed by his critics. The debate has ranged from Malcolm Cowley's insistence that the work combines “two or more themes having little relation to each other” to Richard Chase's elaborate theory of “images of the curve” opposed to “images of linear discreteness.” Those critics who see a unity in the novel find its organizing principle in theme or philosophical statement—“a successful metaphysical conceit,” a concern with Southern religion, the tragedy of human isolation, man's lonely search for community—but they fail to find a common ground for the unity they perceive because they neglect properly to evaluate the objective device which Faulkner employs in the novel as an expression of theme. That device is the pervasive paralleling of character traits, actions, and larger structural shapes to the story of Christ. Viewed in terms of this device the novel becomes the story of the life and death of a man peculiarly like Christ in many particulars, an account of what Ilse D. Lind has called “the path to Gethsemane which is reserved for the Joe Christmases of this world.” However, that account is in itself perverse, “a monstrous and grotesque irony,” unless the other strands of action in the book—the Hightower story and the Lena Grove story—are seen as being contrasting portions of a thematic statement also made suggestively by analogies to the Christ story. This essay is an attempt to demonstrate that such, indeed, is the basic nature of the novel and that it has a unity which is a function of its uses of the Christ story.
Birch, Johnson, and Elizabeth Carter: An Episode of 1738-39
Authors: Ruhe Edward
Published: February 2007

Dr. Johnson's twenty-five-year friendship with the historian, antiquary, and clubman, Thomas Birch (1705-66), is significant for several reasons. First, it covers Johnson's earliest and most obscure years in London; second, it shows him in a curious association with a man of nearly the same age whose contemporary eminence and excellent social and intellectual connections contrasted remarkably with his own during the years before the Dictionary; and third, it gave rise to a large number of little-known Johnsonian passages in Birch's various correspondences. The Birch papers in the British Museum reveal their compiler as, among many other things, a voluminous if unsystematic and usually noncommittal chronicler of Johnson's career between 1738 and 1765. As a Whig with predominant Whig connections, Birch sometimes dealt harshly with Johnson. As a weathervane of taste, he was as often content to report current gossip or the progress of Johnson's projects as he learned of them through the newspapers, or in conversation with other friends or with Johnson himself. Once, by request, he wrote a short but extremely laudatory letter concerning Johnson's Dictionary. But the few well-known documents on the Birch-Johnson friendship suggest that relations were somehow disordered. Johnson's ten known letters to Birch are peremptory, cold, and without friendly expressions; his review of Birch's History of the Royal Society, published in 1756, was distinctly unfavorable; and his rumored final verdict on Birch (“a dull writer” [Boswell, i, 159]) is perhaps more widely known than Birch's services to English historiography. Johnson was content to remember Birch for a single talent: “he had more anecdotes than any man”—they flowed “like the river Thames” (Boswell, v, 255). Sir John Hawkins quoted Johnson on Birch, and the characterization, adapted by Boswell, has been endlessly repeated at Birch's expense: “Tom is a lively rogue; he remembers a great deal, and can tell many pleasant stories; but a pen is to Tom a torpedo, the touch of it benumbs his hand and his brain: Tom can talk; but he is no writer.”
Vigny and Pascal
Authors: Hill Charles G.
Published: February 2007

In 1850, mindful of Victor Cousin's second call for a re-edition of the Pensées? Alfred de Vigny made the following comment in his Journal:
Vision In To The Lighthouse
Authors: Pedersen Glenn
Published: February 2007

“Some one had blundered.” The vision of Lily Briscoe reveals that it was Mrs. Ramsay.
Surrey's Debt to Gawin Douglas
Authors: Ridley Florence H.
Published: February 2007

The importance of Gawin Douglas' Eneados, the first English translation of the Aeneid, has been acknowledged since the sixteenth century. In 1530 David Lindsay wrote of Douglas' “worthy workis . . . And, speciallye, the trew Translatioun / Off Uirgill,” and forty years later Barnabie Googe ranked the Scots poet's translation above that of his English successor, Surrey,
The Noble H. Hawarde once,That raught eternall fame, With mighty style did bring a peceOf Virgil's worke in frame, And Grimaold gave the lyke attempt,And Douglas wan the Ball, Whose famous wyt in Scottysh rymeHad made an ende of all.
Yeats's “Dove or Swan”
Authors: Whitaker Thomas R.
Published: February 2007

The section of A Vision entitled “Dove or Swan” sets forth in brilliant prose a panorama of Western history that is almost without incoherence or irrelevance. Civilizations seem to rise and fall in nearly strict harmony with Yeats's wheels and gyres—and we suspect a yielding to what Henry Adams called the historian's most serious temptation: “if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.” But Yeats might retort with another romantic, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign?” For, despite conflicting statements of intention, Yeats too was primarily committed to the task of illuminating universal experience. With many other poets of the last two centuries he turned to history for his material—even as historians often turned to poetry for their method. “Dove or Swan” was useful to him as an intermediate stage between the raw data of history and the dense symbolism of his poetry. But it is also important in itself as a typically romantic achievement: a vision of history as art.
The Personality of Chaucer the Pilgrim
Authors: Major John M.
Published: February 2007

Much of the fascination—and complexity —of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales may be attributed to the elusiveness of Chaucer's point of view. Is the “I” of the General Prologue Chaucer the man, Chaucer the poet, or a persona created for the situation by the poet? In order to arrive at a satisfactory interpretation of either the Prologue or the Tales as a whole, we have first to decide as best we can who it is that is reporting to us the appearance, characters, actions, conversations, and stories of himself and his fellow pilgrims.
Freud on Shakespeare
Authors: Holland Norman N.
Published: February 2007

Freud's discovery of the unconscious at the end of the nineteenth century bids fair to be the defining factor in the intellectual life of the twentieth. Already, Freud's ideas seem to have touched everyone from the juvenile delinquent on the corner to the scholar in his study. Biography, history, literary criticism, and, not least, the study of Shakespeare, psychoanalysis has affected them all. Hamlet's Oedipus complex (thanks to Sir Laurence Olivier's film) has become as conspicuous a feature in the popular image of Shakespeare as the controversy about authorship. Freud was a psychologist, however, not a critic, and his remarks about Shakespeare, like all his literary comments, were only incidental to his main study, the mind of man. As a result, his Shakespearian insights are scattered through his works. No one, so far as I know, has clearly established just exactly what Freud said about Shakespeare or where he said it. The purpose of this article is to answer those two questions, that is, to set out in systematic form Freud's comments on, references to, and quotations from Shakespeare, and second, to provide via the footnotes a bibliography for them. I have summarized Freud's remarks in the following order: first, his remarks on Shakespeare generally; second, his views on authorship; third, the points he makes about particular plays and poems (arranged alphabetically). Within these large divisions, references are arranged in order of generality, larger topics first. Topics of equal generality within a given work are put in the order in which they appear in the work. Where Freud made more than one reference to a topic (e.g., a particular character or quotation), the references are arranged chronologically according to the time Freud made them (which may or may not coincide with the order of publication).
Polyeucte and the de Imitatione Christi
Authors: Haley Marie Philip
Published: February 2007

In his masterly study of le Sentiment de l'Amour dans I'CEuvre de Pierre Corneille, M. Octave Nadal makes one reservation regarding Polyeucte. After rooting the spiritual adventure of the martyr in the climate of conjugal love where both blood and spirit stir, M. Nadal acknowledges nonetheless a certain ambiguity in the psychology of the hero. He goes so far as to say that in Polyeucte's speeches one could easily find “des formules” which deny the heroism and grandeur of human love at the same time that “l'action même du martyr ne tend jamais qu'à les prouver et à les consacrer.” M. R. Chauviré and M. Raymond Lebègue have made similar observations.
Buffon and Rousseau: Aspects of a Relationship
Authors: Fellows Otis
Published: February 2007

It seems safe to say that no writer of the French Enlightenment, with the possible exception of Voltaire, has received so much attention as that strangely paradoxical genius Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We know he was born in Switzerland of French blood, was largely self-taught, and made his vagabond way across eighteenth-century France, leaving in his wake a considerable number of works, the best known of which were all highly incandescent: the two Discourses, Lettre sur les spectacles, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Le Contrat social, Emile, and the Confessions.
Fifteen Letters from Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel to J. G. Schweighäuser, Paris, 1802–1804
Authors: Kahn Robert L.
Published: February 2007

One of the most crucial periods in Friedrich Schlegel's life was his first stayin Paris in the years 1802–04. In these almost two years his views underwent a remarkable transformation—the radical analyst of a preponderantly literary persuasion changed into the conservative synthesist of a more decidedly philosophical-religious cast. The glories of the past were more thoroughly explored: the German and Romance Middle Ages, Sanskrit and comparative philology, European thought and its roots in the Orient. As for the present and future, the clarion call for nationalism was sounded and the road to Catholicism sketched.
Goethe und Bettina von Arnim: Ein Neuer Fund
Authors: von Faber du Faur Von Curt
Published: February 2007

Durch die geschichte der deutschen Literatur im hochsten ihrer Augenblicke geistert die Gestalt der Bettina Brentano, Frankfurterin italienischer Abkunft, ein Licht das sich als Irrlicht gab, eine ewig unruhige Flamme, nicht weit strahlend, aber unauslöschbar, auftauchend hier und dann wieder dort, lästig in seiner zitternden Unruhe, aber mit der Stetigkeit eines Naturgesetzes wiederkehrend, so füllt sie die erste Hälfte des vorigen Jahrhunderts aus. Man braucht sie nur für einen Augenblick wegzudenken und man fühlt sofort, was alles fehlen würde, wenn sie nicht da gewesen wäre. So viel Leichtes, Sprudelndes, Spontanes und Beschwingtes, das in der Literatur der Welt kaum eine Parallele besitzt, wurde uns nur in ihr geschenkt, so viel Seelensprache Dinge zu benennen, die noch ungenannt waren. Eine Virtuosin der Liebe, so scheint es, aber soviel sie von Liebe spricht, es ist nichts Lüsternes in ihr, nichts von Ungesundem, Falsch-Mondänem, nichts was an Elinor Glyn erinnern konnte. Wollte man nach einer Verwandtschaft in neuerer Zeit suchen, so wäre es die zur Grafin Fanny Reventlow, dieser ewig liebenden Sucherin nach dem Geistigen im Manne. Bettina war mehr, sehr viel mehr gegeben als der armen durchgegangenen Komtesse. Sie hatte kein Vaterhaus dem man zu entlaufen gezwungen war. Sie war relativ glücklich geboren, in ahnlichen Kreisen unter ahnlichen Verhaltnissen in derselben Stadt wie Goethe, sechsunddreissig Jahre nach ihm. Sie war Erbin alles dessen was er geschaffen hatte. Nicht gebunden in die patrizischen Sitten der alten Familien, der Gunderodes, Stallburgs, Adlerflychts und Lersners, auch nicht zugehorig zur Klasse der Ratsfamilien, die unter sich die hochsten Amter teilten und denen unter Grossvater Textors Regierung ein merkbarer Miasmus entströmte, aber wohl geboren genug um überall Zutritt zu haben. Wenn Peter Anton Brentano noch kleinburgerliche Zuge geblieben waren, seine Kinder waren Leute von Welt und Bettina war so sehr Dame, dass sie aus alien Regeln schlagen, ein freier Mensch und ganz sie selbst sein konnte, seit ihrer Heirat mit Achim von Arnim auch “bien aparantée,” so sehr, dass ihre jüngste Tochter ihre Heirat mit Herman Grimm der Familie gegenuber zunachst geheim hielt—ein Burgerlicher!
Wordsworth: Poet of the Unconquerable Mind
Authors: Weaver Bennett
Published: February 2007

Wordsworth, said Arnold, “is one of the very chief glories of English Poetry.” From the beginning his has been a “divine vitality.” He himself was persuaded that he derived his light from heaven; and like Piccarda, who, though humbly placed, found her peace in God's will, Wordsworth, though not “pre-eminent in magnitude,” was assured that the light which came to him was, for that reason, of no less divine origin. With this persuasion some of his contemporaries and some of ours are not in accord. Their reasons, of course, are greatly various. Yet it is noteworthy that certain of those characteristics which in his own time made him slow to be accepted, in our time tend to make him poorly read or not read at all. Hence it would seem that one might say something about the characteristics in question.
Hazlitt on the Poetry of Wit
Authors: Albrecht W. P.
Published: February 2007

The greatest poetry, according to Hazlitt, is the “truest” poetry and therefore the most passionate; for, to communicate the essential truths of nature, a poet must feel intensely. Lesser poetry falls short by offering a limited or “abstracted” view of nature. This abstraction may be due to imitating other poets, as in the “poetry of common places”; to the poet's preoccupation with his own experience, as in the “poetry of paradox”; or to the use of “articial” materials, as in the “poetry of wit.” Each kind lacks the truth of great poetry, for each kind, in one way or another, limits the range or depth of feeling. But whereas the “poetry of common places” and the “poetry of paradox” simply have the qualities of great poetry to a lesser degree, the “poetry of wit” has a “kind and degree of excellence” of its own.
The Early Yeats and the Pattern of History
Authors: Whitaker Thomas R.
Published: February 2007

In 1926, coming upon Spengler's Decline of the West, Yeats was amazed and delighted. “Here is a very strange thing,” he wrote to Sturge Moore, “which will show you what I meant when I wrote of individual man not being shut up in a bottle.” While he had been drawing his diagrams for the historical sketch in A Vision, Spengler's first edition had been going through the press. Had there been some occult communication? “I can almost say… that there is no difference in our interpretation of history (an interpretation that had never occurred to anybody before) that is not accounted for by his great and my slight erudition.” Though Yeats exaggerated, the similarities are substantial; but the means of communication are more various than he wished to allow. Many of Spengler's views were far from novel; and Yeats's early acquaintance with philosophies of history was much broader than his disclaimers of erudition imply. In fact, by 1895 his own historical symbolism was taking clear form; and like Spengler's system, it was amply nourished by the common thought of nineteenth-century Europe.
Dryden's Religio Laici: An Anglican Poem
Authors: Fujimtjra Thomas H.
Published: February 2007

Most dryden scholars believe that Religio Laici (1682) is not a statement of the Anglican position, though the poet asserts that it is. In fact, the widely accepted view is that it is a Catholic poem in spirit. This interpretation was established by Louis I. Bredvold in a very influential book, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (1934), in which he stated, “Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther are so closely allied in their philosophy that the earlier poem might be regarded as a sort of prelude or introduction to the later.” Prior to Bredvold's pronouncement, some critics had questioned the orthodoxy of Religio Laici as an Anglican poem, and had suggested that Dryden was troubled by religious doubts and that he was halfway on the road to Catholicism in 1682. It was Bredvold, however, who crystallized these views by asserting unequivocally that the poem was fideistic, and hence Catholic in thought and temper.
Benjamín Jarnés: Aspects of the Dehumanized Novel
Authors: Ilie Paul
Published: February 2007

Ortega has maintained in his Ideas sobre la novela that action is not the essence of a novel, a principle which he corroborates by the fact that most plots are readily forgotten. For Ortega, the novel's essence is pure being or nonaction, manifested by the state of its characters. One of the most conscientious practitioners of Ortegan theory was Benjamín Jarnés, who in Locura y muerte de nadie (Madrid, 1929) wrote a novel revealing human reality stripped of its vital core: action, passion, and sentiment. The process of devoiding reality of its real content while leaving a mere semblance of reality as the remainder is, of course, “dehumanization” in the Ortegan definition of the term. Two further aspects of Jarnés' novel—the absence of a personality in his protagonist and the use of a highly abstract, cerebral language—serve to supplement the meaning of “dehumanization” at least as far as narrative fiction is involved. But Locura y muerte… also commands attention because its author reaches out into areas of cultural and philosophical significance in order to determine the causes of a comparable dehumanization in contemporary life at the same time that he depicts this life fictionally. My procedure in this essay will be to discuss first Jarnés' notion of the interplay between the masses and the individual personality; then, in the light of this, the attitudes underlying his approach to this particular novel; and, finally, the techniques involved in the verbalization of his novel.
Contemporary Theater and Aesthetic Distance
Authors: Büdel Oscar
Published: February 2007

In confuting Schlegel's ideas on the rôle of the chorus in Greek tragedy, Nietzsche said that he believed in an aesthetic audience and thought the single spectator to be the more capable, the more he was able to take the work of art as art, namely aesthetically. Some forty years thereafter modern drama felt called upon to awaken the spectator from his “illusionist period”—as if there had been any danger that, again in Nietzsche's words, the ideal spectator might rush onto the stage to free the God from his torment. Yet to prevent this once and for all seems to have been one of the foremost axioms of the Expressionist and kindred revolts of the first decade of this century.
Twilight or Dawn: The Present State of Modern Language Studies
Authors: Starck Taylor
Published: February 2007

At a meeting held on 26 April 1886, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Johns Hopkins University, Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, Professor of Greek, spoke some words that have with slight variations been more recently applied to the study of modern languages, and indeed to other disciplines. Gildersleeve said in part:

To some, I do not know how many, certainly to some of those whom I am addressing, the special line of work to which my own life has been devoted may seem to have had its day, and to plan for the future of Greek is to plan for an elaborate structure on the foundation of some Table Rock, destined at no distant time to fall and disappear on the restless current of modern life. A monument was erected some years since to the memory of the last old woman that spoke Cornish, and it would require no great stretch of imagination on the part of some of our friends to fancy that some youth may be present here today who shall live to see the cremation of the last successor of Sir John Cheke on this side of the Atlantic, of the last old woman, trousered or untrousered, that shall have discharged the office of a Professor of Greek in an American university.
Dryden's Heroic Line
Authors: Hemphill George
Published: February 2007

Every reader of Dryden's critical essays must recall his concern with the sound as well as the sense of poetry. In the “Original and Progress of Satire,” for example, he says that “versification and meter are the greatest pleasures of poetry. … When there is anything deficient in numbers, and sound, the reader is uneasy, and dissatisfied; he wants something of his complement; desires somewhat which he finds not.” We can be sure, therefore, that Dryden more than some other poets paid close attention to the fabric of his verse. But it is another question whether the regularity or “correctness” which he aimed at, and which he achieved for his translation of Virgil, is generally admired today. If it is admired, it is admired only as one admires an antique. The taste of most modern poets is not for regularity but for liberty bordering on license. In this respect they are like the late Elizabethans and Jacobeans who wrote—to use the phrase which Dryden took from the French —prose mesurée.
Etymologies Légendaires des mots France et Gaule Pendant la Renaissance
Authors: Poujol Jacques
Published: February 2007

Presque tous lës érudits français de la Renaissance qui ont étudié les origines lointaines de leur pays sont venus buter sur ce problème ardu: d'où vient le mot France? que signifie le nom de Franci porté par une obscure tribu germanique avant de désigner le peuple français? La légende de Francus ne constitue pas le seul essai de réponse à ces difficiles questions. A côté des textes qui, avant Lemaire de Belges, développent le thème des origines troyennes de la France, il en est bien d'autres qui proposent du terme Franci des explications différentes: francus est un adjectif synonyme de féroce, ou une épithète signifiant ‘franc’ ou ‘libre.’ En outre, un nouveau cycle de légendes étymologiques fondé sur le mot Galli fait son apparition à la fin du quinzième siècle, lorsque des humanistes épris de bonne latinité affectent d'appeler “Gaulois” les habitants de la France. Le but de cette étude est de montrer l'incidence de ces problèmes étymologiques, non seulement sur l'œuvre de poètes comme Lemaire de Belges et Ronsard, mais aussi sur les écrits de plusieurs historiens, philosophes et théoriciens politiques entre les Illustrations de Gaule (1510) et la Franciade (1572).
Mark Twain Describes a San Francisco Earthquake
Authors: Carter Paul J. , Twain Mark
Published: February 2007

“Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” was published in the New York Saturday Press on 18 November 1865. On that same day the New York Weekly Review announced (xvi, 5): “… a contribution from the sprightly pen of Mark Twain, one of the cleverest of the San Francisco writers, will appear … next Saturday.” Accordingly, on Saturday, 25 November, the Weekly Review printed “The Great Earthquake in San Francisco” over the signature of Mark Twain.
Shaw's Contributions to Music Criticism
Authors: Barber George S.
Published: February 2007

The years 1856–1950 represent the life span of George Bernard Shaw, one of the most pungent, witty, and versatile geniuses to be absorbed into the mind of the thinking world. The years 1888–94 represent the six years which he devoted to the concentrated effort of writing music criticism, first for the Star (1888–89) and then for the World (1890–94). Yet, despite their value as important contributions to critical literature, and notwithstanding their worth as patently clear statements and applications of Shaw's theories of art and criticism, these works have received little more than routine treatment from even the best of Shavian scholars.
The Disobedient Artist: Joyce and Loyola
Authors: Morse J. Mitchell
Published: February 2007

The Jesuits never forgave Joyce for refusing to enter their Society, and he never forgave them for inviting him. The influence of this quarrel on his career is well known, and the effects of his Jesuit training on his work are often remarked in a general way. It remains, however, to specify the effects; for only when they are specified can we see clearly just what he rebelled against and why his rebellion took the forms it did. Joyce's books are in fact full of echoes from those of Saint Ignatius Loyola; we might begin by identifying some of them and assessing their significance.
The Diana of Montemayor: Tradition and Innovation
Authors: Avalle-Arce Juan Bautista
Published: February 2007

The publication of the Diana, probably in Valencia, 1559, marks the birth of the pastoral novel in Spain. Most of what has been written on the book has been centered around the problem of influences, that is to say, the extent of Montemayor's imitation of Sannazaro's Arcadia. Such a view, regardless of its merits, tends to leave unexplained the book itself, since a book—the artistic accomplishment—is not what it is because of any certain, or uncertain, influences, but in spite of them. Life, and thereby literature, are not only the sum total of our actions, of what we do, but also of what we refrain from doing, and, furthermore, our actions are a composite of inherited patterns of reaction plus the new and improvised attitudes we strike when challenged by the renewing and omnipresent crossroads of life. If we are to study the Diana, or any other book, as a distillation of life, one of the important things is not to point out the influence of Sannazaro, which I fail to see, or of anybody else, but to underline the measure of acceptance of such an influence (the thin dividing line between the “done” and “not done” by the author in search for artistic expression), and then to seek the way it is to be harmonized with the new chords the author is trying to strike.
Science in Biblical Paraphrases in Eighteenth-Century England
Authors: Jones W. Powell
Published: February 2007

When Joseph Trapp, early in the eighteenth century, delivered his lectures on science as a subject for poetry, he was enthusiastic about the possibilities but pessimistic over the scientific poetry of his time. “The same age that shew'd a Boyle, a Halley, and a Newton,” he said, had not been able to produce a Virgil. Nothing is more suitable to the dignity of a poem, he continued, “than to celebrate the works of the great creator” or to the variety of poetical subject matter “than to describe the journeys of the heavenly orbs, the rise of thunder, and other meteors, the motion of the earth, and the tides of the sea; the attractive force of the magnet, the impulsive motion of light, and the slower progression of sound; and innumerable other wonders, in the unbounded storehouse of nature.”
Some Notes on Johnson and the Gentleman's Magazine
Authors: Greene D. J.
Published: February 2007

Perhaps someone will eventually undertake the heroic task of making a really systematic study of the file of the Gentleman's Magazine, in the hope of arriving at a more satisfying account of Johnson's part in it than we now have. The following observations do not represent such an attempt; they are the product of a relatively cursory inspection of some of the early volumes, and are offered with the expectation that they will raise more questions than they will answer. Still, such questions ought to be raised, in the hope that a consideration of them will in the end contribute to the higher standards of comprehensiveness and precision in Johnson studies which modern students would like to see attained.
Point of View in The Turn of the Screw
Authors: Jones Alexander E.
Published: February 2007

Although Henry James described The Turn of the Screw as “rather a shameless potboiler,” subsequent criticism has treated the work with more respect. As Robert Heilman has pointed out, the tale has inspired a surprising amount of discussion and speculation. Indeed, Heilman feels that James must have “hit upon some fundamental truth of experience that no generation can ignore and that each generation wishes to restate in its own terms.”