Behind nearly all English literary criticism, particularly that relating to the Neo-classic drama, lies the Poetics of Aristotle. Some writers have been greatly affected by this epochal work; others have come under its sphere of influence to a lesser degree. However, there are few authors of importance upon whom the Poetics has failed to make some profound and enduring impression. Despite the fact that its influence permeates all English literature, excessive emphasis is laid sometimes upon the effect of Aristotle's teachings, to the detriment of such prominent critics as Horace, Vida, Trissino, Giraldi, Boileau, and Fontenelle. This applies especially to commentators on Hume. Indeed, the Scottish philosopher, historian, and critic subscribed to the majority of Aristotle's tenets, but the doctrines of Tully, Horace, Boileau, and Corneille made an equally impressive and indelible imprint upon his mind.

Characteristic of the Italian Language is the modern use of the conditional perfect instead of the present. This interchange of tenses is not permitted by either of her two living sister languages, French and Spanish. Nor does English admit such constructions: we are not allowed to say, for example, “He said he should have done it tomorrow,” but must say, “He said he would do it tomorrow.” In Italian on the other hand, there are numerous examples of this construction as the following quotations will illustrate:

To anyone who has followed the development of the theory of ballad origins, it is well known that there are two main theories in the field for our suffrages at the present time: the communal; and the individualistic, literary, or anti-communal theory. The last name of the second theory is indicative of the attitude of its upholders, for they have in truth been largely occupied with a criticism of the communalists, always demanding of them more and ever more light, and ever, like doubting Thomas, refusing to believe until an actual ballad dating from at least the time of Hereward the Wake is produced for their fingers to touch. The communalists, by an appeal to the well-established facts of folk-lore and ethnology, maintain that the ballads are the product of the communal stage of society in Europe, in which the populace held festive dances, and in which there was actual improvisation of certain traditional lyric narratives. These narratives had their verse-form determined by the dance; and the whole poem from beginning to end was the product of the people, and was not in any way composed by literary persons. Moreover, these ballads have been handed down by oral tradition, and live in the mouths of the people. Of course, there is no claim that one expects to find in the ballads of the collections anything which springs directly from the ancient source; all that is claimed is that the poetic form is handed down, and, so to say, the general ballad tradition. This claim of long descent is substantiated by the very features of the ballads as they exist to-day; by their impersonality, their refrain, their depicting of but a single situation, their use of incremental repetition. Thus, it is maintained, the ballad is not derived from any pre-existing literary material, but is the result of a primary impulse which is as old as man, and out of which the various forms of communal poetry spring. Finally, the ballad is not connected with the popular tale; “it follows an entirely different line and springs from an entirely different impulse.”

Flaubert's representation of the 1848 revolution in L'éducation sentimentale brings irony and the sublime into a relation of simultaneous opposition and dependency. An uncertain irony constructs the revolution as an aporia: as both an impoverished imitation of 1789 (a cliché) and a tragic modern apocalypse. Particularly in the famous Fontainebleau episode, where the rhetorical violence of irony is enacted in the analogy between the awesome turbulence of nature and the chaos of a nonteleological historical process, irony gives rise to the affects of fear and transport characteristic of the sublime. And the turn from an uncanny irony to the countermode of self-empowerment is set in motion by the same fear of death that haunts the novel's historiographical intertext, the Micheletist cliché of resurrection. But while the Micheletist sublime constructs a version of historical and ontological truth, the Flaubertian sublime transforms meaninglessness itself into power. Reified as ideology, that power would be neither inflexible nor monolithic, for it emerges and recedes repeatedly in the context of a self-interrogating and fundamentally ironic narrative. (VKR)

The earlier poets in the English meditative tradition, Southwell, Alabaster, Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw, were all poets of Catholic or Anglo-Catholic tendency, where the Continental art of meditation found a fertile ground in which to develop an English counterpart. It is significant that all five of these earlier poets became priests: Southwell, bred and executed as a Catholic; Alabaster, shifting from Anglican to Catholic to Anglican; Donne, born and bred a Catholic, but turning finally to the English Church; Crashaw, born and bred a Protestant, but turning finally to the Roman Church; and Herbert, happy all his life within the English communion. They had their doctrinal differences, and I do not wish to minimize those differences; but they had something more in common: a devotion to the central mysteries of the Passion, a devotion to the symbols and a liturgy that served to celebrate those mysteries. All would have agreed with George Herbert's vision of “The Agonie”: Who knows not Love, let him assay And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike Did set again abroach; then let him say If ever he did taste the like. Love is that liquour sweet and most divine, Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.

What do we tell our students? the question implies a range of assumptions, most obviously the simple hope that such a conversation might even take place. Imagine a student dropping by during office hours or approaching us after class to ask for our thoughts on the choice of a major. Or consider a different scenario: the faculty member struggling to find the right tone in order to strike up a conversation with a student about his or her academic plans. Certainly such discussions take place, certainly teachers and students talk about educational goals, and certainly a teacher's advice can at times be important for a student. Yet all this reassurance cannot disguise the fragility of the situation. For it is equally certain that the question overstates the frequency, significance, and ramifications of these sorts of exchanges. Parental pressure plays a larger role in the real decision making than does a teacher's advice. (Perhaps there is a journal somewhere for parents of college students with a discussion on “Choosing the Right Major: What DoWe Tell Our Children?”) Many of us have spoken with students who plea their interest in selecting a literature major but find themselves compelled by their parents to choose something allegedly more practical. I for one have rarely met students passionate about a major in business but whose families heartlessly forced them to study literature.

In her last essay, “House of the One Father” (1941), Mary Antin, most famous for her immigrant autobiography, The Promised Land (1912), questioned her “divorcement” from Jewish life and found herself

The normal sign for ń in Old French is ign. The consonantal portion of this trigraph represents the value of Latin gn as felt or pronounced in the Merovingian period in such words as magnus, agnellus, the sequence of development probably being gn > > > ń thru the fronting influence of n upon the preceding . That the vowel i should have been added to gn with this new palatal value will not appear strange to anyone familiar with the history of palatalized consonants in Old French. It represents the vowel glide which is potentially present whenever a palatalized consonant follows after a vowel. Its appearance in writing must therefore be due to a definite consciousness of its presence as a phonic element in the spoken syllable. In other words, the scribes who invented the trigraph ign must have heard and felt the vowel. And as a matter of fact, the modern pronunciation of this sound in final position and before consonant shows that this assumption is accurate; for gain, coin, juin presuppose an earlier pronunciation gãiń, kõiń, džỹiń, and plaindre and joindre must have passed thru plãindre, džõindre. However, if this evidence may be accepted as conclusive for the presence of the i under these conditions, there is equally strong evidence in the modern language that in medial position (montagne, gagner, besogne) the palatal glide did not develop into a full vowel.

The nervous, obsessional Lawrence, summoning mysterious gods, blueprinting Utopian colonies with himself at their head, and assuming the Christlike task of changing the course of modern history, tends to shut out our view of the other Lawrences. He was also, somewhat unexpectedly, a writer with a highly developed flair for comic satire.

It is well known that Coleridge had Wordsworth in mind when he wrote his Ode on Dejection—the poem is addressed to Wordsworth, mentions Wordsworth's Lucy Gray, and was first published on the day of Wordsworth's wedding; but that Coleridge's Ode may have been influenced by Wordsworth's great Ode on Intimations of Immortality has been generally overlooked. If the date of Wordsworth's Ode is 1803–1806, as it is often given in the anthologies and histories, such influence is impossible, because we know Coleridge's Dejection was composed April 4, 1802. The date 1803–1806, however, is not accepted by most scholars; Professor John D. Rea emphatically states, “It is known that the date 1803 is wrong; the Ode was begun 1802.” The passage in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, written March 27, 1802, “At breakfast William wrote part of an ode,” refers, it is now believed, to the Ode: Intimations of Immortality. On March 27, 1802, Wordsworth was writing his great Ode; and a week later, on April 4, 1802, Coleridge wrote his.

Ritson in a letter to Scott, dated July 2, 1803, writes: “I have put into Mr. Longman's hands at his own request, for the opinion of some critic he is used to consult, my ‘Life of King Arthur.’” Again, in a letter of August 16, 1803 to his nephew, Joseph Frank, editor of his correspondence, he says: “I will give you .... all of my late publications, if you have not got them already; then, such as are to come: ‘the Life of King Arthur,’ which I have finished, etc.”. (Letters, II, 247 f.). Ritson died September 23, 1803. From the editor's advertisement to King Arthur we learn: “The curious work now offered to the world was prepared for the press by Mr. Ritson, with a view to immediate publication, a short time before his death.” Thus, the date of composition is clearly 1803. The book marks the culmination of Ritson's researches into the history and literature of the middle ages; it was the fruit of mature experience in a life devoted to scholarly investigation.

This bibliographical essay brings together for the first time all evaluations of Housman's poetry and poetic-theory 1920-1945. It effects a twofold end: (1) historical—a survey of Housman estimates by scholar-critics and by poet-critics; (2) critical—a survey of all critical ideas and problems of contemporary criticism as focussed upon a poet of the preceding age.

This essay provides a revisionary interpretation of one of the most important treatments of emotion (and its relation to reason) in the early period of modern European vernacular literature, Guido Cavalcanti's “Donna me prega” (“A Lady Asks Me”). According to the prevailing interpretation, the poem denigrates love as an animal power, a subhuman force that destroys our properly human rationality. Reading the poem's treatment of love in the light of Averroës's views, especially as presented in his Long Commentary on Aristotle's De anima, reveals that Cavalcanti celebrates love as paradigmatic of human reason, part and parcel of one's leading a rational and therefore human life. Love, the operation of a rational power that is mortal (not immortal) and natural (not supernatural), is for human beings the “perfect good,” the full extent of our flourishing and the best for which we can hope.

I. Sága, the Name of a Goddess. Jacob Grimm, in his Mythologie (ii, 759), interpreted the name Sága as a personification of the appellative saga ‘history, story.‘ This interpretation has now been rightly rejected because the long radical vowel a in the proper name Sága is attested by its occurrence in skaldic verse. I question, however, whether this difference in the quantity of the radical vowel in these two forms warrants the conclusion that they are not etymologically related.

Hans naumann gibt in seiner Deutschen Dichtung der Gegenwart (1923) folgende Darstellung von Clara Viebigs Kunst:

Naturalismus wie Heimatkunst, peinlichst genaue Gegenstandsmalerei, sozialen wie psychologischen Realismus, all dies beherrscht diese verspätete, aber konsequent gebliebene und bedeutendste Naturalistin in ganz ausserordentlichem Mass.

Arecent study of the manuscripts of the works of Chrétien de Troyes contains an appendix which purports to survey the published fragments of the various romances. In point of fact, so far as Erec is concerned, it omits all reference to the. three fragments we now possess. Those to which the author refers are not properly speaking manuscript fragments, but rather early publications of excerpts from complete manuscripts which have now been collated by Foerster in his large edition and by myself in a forthcoming edition of the same romance. Therefore, despite the fact that Foerster's collation was careless and incomplete, these early fragmentary publications are of slight interest. However, in an extensive work dealing with the ensemble of the manuscript tradition of Chrétien, some mention should have been made of the three real fragments which we possess, even though, as the editors of the two published ones have remarked, they are not extensive enough to be of great importance in the classification of the manuscripts.

When we remember the subtle irregularity of Milton's rhymes in Lycidas, and the frequency with which he introduces rhyme into the blank verse of Comus and Samson Agonistes, it is less surprising that there should be rhymes in Paradise Lost than that they should not have been noticed. That they are deliberate rhymes needs little proof, for it is obvious that an ear as fine as Milton's must have heard any rhyme which can be heard by the ordinary reader, and this examination grew out of the vague impression of rhyme given by certain passages in Paradise Lost, and the presence of a few obvious rhymes, such as:

Rose like an Exhalation, with the sound
Of Dulcet Symphonies and voices sweet,
Built like a Temple, where Pilasters round (i. 711–713)
This horror will grow milde, this darkness light,
Besides what hope the never-ending flight (ii. 220–221)
Allegeance to th'acknowledg'd Power supream?
And thou sly hypocrite, who now wouldst seam, (iv. 956–957)
That slumberd, wakes the bitter memorie
Of what he was, what is, and what must be Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.
Some times towards Eden which now in his view (iv. 24–27)