When Abraham Cowley died in 1667, he was mourned by practically the whole English literary world with such eulogies as the following:

In that rich volume, The Decline and Fall of the West, we observe that the color preferences of a given people or age are considered as a part of the accumulated evidence that finally places the cultural stage of the group in the whole vast Spenglerian cycle. The Greeks, we learn, were fond of primitive reds and yellows, while the Christians, partly in revolt against Greek paganism, came to prefer the other end of the color scale, the greens and blues, and the purity of white. Red had become for them a symbol of sin and bloodshed, and yellow a mark of shame. These observations are further tied up with Spengler's time-space theories. The Greeks, whose time-space conceptions are labelled as present, as contrasted with our own efforts to link the dim past and the remote future by the aid of our historical and evolutionary perspective, are said naturally to prefer red and its variants as symbolic of life, love, and splendid action; while the Christians as naturally preferred the more remote greens, blues, and whites as symbolic of meditation and worship, the projection of interest into the mystic, the supernatural, the life yet unrealized. A later romantic development also associated blues and greens with nature and its poetry, while whites, grays and blacks inevitably spell the abstract, the psychic, and the mystery of the unknown.

When Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, turned in his intervals of gouty leisure to dramatic composition, he made his plays supplement the political manœuvers of his active periods by embodying in them the crescent love-and-honor theme, which, rooted in pre-Commonwealth drama, was being sponsored by the Frenchified Charles II. But while thus pleasing the King and the Court by being alertly à la mode, he remembered the dramatic associations of his Cavalier days and revived after the Puritan depression certain elements of Jacobean and Caroline drama. Among them was the friendship theme, so frequently and significantly employed in plays of those former decades. If he had merely repeated the old situations and rephrased the worn clichés, there would be little point in analyzing his plays for his use of the theme except to show continuity between pre-Commonwealth drama and Restoration drama. But he modified it and made it an aid in his persistent king-worship. And more important still, he used the theme in developing the love-and-honor conflict.

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.

Despite their tendency to metaphorize and disembody blindness, the sighted have used it to represent the body's experience of coming to knowledge in a world of things. The vibrant intensity of the attachment to things in Victorian literature makes this writing a rich site for exploring the way represented blindness comes to figure what a body articulated by materiality knows and does not know of itself and of the world. Reading works by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, among others, this essay accounts for an impious strain in representations of blindness and examines how the Victorian literary imagination of blindness evinces a palpable desire for it, grounded in the fantasy that it permits enviable access to a way of knowing and experiencing things from among them rather than from the abstracting distance imposed by sight. Alongside its imagination of the buffeting distress of thingly encounters, blindness envy fantasizes an aesthetics of disorientation and surprise.

The history of the pastoral is a long history; perhaps no other manner of writing has exerted so wide an influence or held so deep a fascination. The words pastoral, idyllic, Arcadian still move us; they surround us with an atmosphere of charm; they encourage those moments that are unstrenuous; they recall us to an early and almost outgrown freshness of feeling. Yet, oftentimes, the poets of the Golden Age are regarded as mere literary alchemists by critics who cannot yield themselves to genuine poetic illusion, failing to recognize in that distant world the embodiment of really existent beauty. Pastoral has, in many cases, justly been a word of reproach and ridicule, a synonym for insipid creations, unreal in feeling, affected in style; but whether good art or bad it has appeared, Proteus-like, in numerous forms. Music, sculpture, and painting have used the pastoral motif; the Good Shepherd has been for twenty centuries, in the Christian church, a tender symbol of Divine Care; and in literature the pastoral has never really faded away, but has come back again and again with persistent appeal. It seems, therefore, that there must be in it some inherent beauty, some elemental greatness which deserves investigation and acknowledgment.

Part of Goethe’s intention in Hermann und Dorothea is to awaken in the reader a disturbing sense of discrepancy between form and content. Systematic, statistically controlled analysis of the poem’s meter, along with a treatment of specific Homeric allusions in the text, leads to this conclusion, also supported by less rigorous but no less valid interpretive arguments. This discrepancy, moreover, is left unresolved, creating a feeling of pervasive irony, but not in the sense of satire or mockery. The reader is encouraged to adopt a superior critical perspective toward the bourgeois values in the poem, but, in that this perspective itself becomes an object of irony, he is also invited to affirm such values. Although this contradiction, like the tension between form and content, is never resolved, it can be understood as expressing an idea of the historical need for bourgeois stability, however banal, in the period depicted.

In July 1927, Virginia Woolf participated in the first of three broadcasts she presented on the BBC. “Are too many Books Written and Published?” was a collaborative project, scripted jointly with her husband, Leonard Woolf, in the typical BBC format of the conversational debate. Virginia was not entirely comfortable in front of a radio microphone, feeling as she did the constrictions of prescribed time limits, the BBC's conventional respectability, and even the sound of her own voice. Yet she engaged in this program with a liveliness, a good humor, and an inventiveness that display her public persona at its best.

“Geoffrey Chaucer,” says Professor Kittredge, “is nearer to us than Alexander Pope.” This is true, not only of the spirit of his times, but also of the man. Chaucer is more like us than Pope is: we feel more mental, moral, and spiritual kinship with the writer of the Nun's Priest's Tale than with the author of the Essay on Man. But, though this is true, we are not to think that therefore we understand him more thoroughly. In reality, we comprehend nearly all of Pope, and some of him we don't like; per contra, we like all of Chaucer that we comprehend: yet there are moods and meanings in him hard to fathom.

Coleridge's theory of “creative Imagination” and his description of The Rime as “a poem of pure imagination” have usually encouraged critics to search for the work's unity. This endeavor represses the text's manifest disjunctions of form and content, as well as slighting Coleridge's use of Gothic conventions. Freudian commentary, while addressing The Rime's irrational, dreamlike qualities, cannot account for the poem's emphasis on linguistic inadequacy or for the horror of the female that pervades the Mariner's tale and his identity. Julia Kristeva's theories of poetic language and of how the subject “abjects” the maternal in attaining the symbolic suggest that The Rime narrates the unspeakable process through which the symbolic is reached. From this perspective The Rime describes the creation of imagination.

It cannot be denied that the personages in Browning's great poem, The Ring and the Book, are of the poet's own making, and he himself would have been the first to acknowledge them as his own creatures. On the other hand, his repeated assertions that, in mingling his fancy with the material derived from the Old Yellow Book, he has not misinterpreted the facts contained in his source, and the insistence upon the poet's historical fidelity by the editor of the “Book” and other critics, have been regarded with suspicion. Indeed, the question has recently been raised whether The Ring and the Book is not a glorious misinterpretation of The Old Yellow Book.

Platonism, in its eclecticism and hidden continuity, proved congenial to Coleridge, whose conception of the nature and role of philosophy differed profoundly from the empirical orthodoxy of his time (and ours). Coleridge's conception resembles the Greek ideal, found in Plotinus and others, of philosophy as less a purely rationalistic pursuit than a form of gnosis involving the whole man and leading toward ultimate perceptions. Platonism has important literary consequences: Coleridge's “philosophical” writings may be read as a complex (and often beautiful) form of prose poetry. Analysis suggests that the mode of argument in crucial chapters of the Biographia (xxi-xiv) is substantially poetic in nature and perhaps deliberately paralogical. Coleridge attempts certainty, without attaining it, and shows, astonishingly, an equivalent of Keats's “Negative Capability” in the disinterestedness of his symbolic investigations or “constructs” of reality. Literary form and style are more important in Coleridge's intellectual prose than has been thought.

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.

Charles Lamb, in the whimsical autobiographical sketch which he wrote in 1827, boasted that he “was the first to draw the public attention to the old English Dramatists, in a work called ‘Specimens of English Dramatic Writers,‘ who lived about the time of Shakespeare.” Lamb's first biographer, Talfourd, pictures the Specimens as slowly and almost imperceptibly working out “the genial purpose of the editor in renewing a taste for the great contemporaries of Shakespeare.” Ainger describes Lamb as a dispeller of ignorance and remarks of the Specimens:

Eighteen department chairmen from seventeen universities met in five sessions at MLA headquarters on Saturday and Sunday, 26 and 27 March 1955, to discuss problems in the recruitment and preparation of college teachers of modern foreign languages. The universities represented had, during the past five years, awarded a total of more than 400 Ph.D. degrees in Germanic and Romance languages. Participants in the meeting are named on page 64 of this report.

Panopticism seeks to make the pysche visible to a top-down system of examination and classification. In the process, it drives out privacy, the right to privacy, and, with them, the right to free self-making. Against this driving out, Etheridge Knight poses a remarkable body of poetry and prose that becomes a kind of antipanopticon in its cultivation of unconstrained communication and communion. During the years he spent as a “guest” of the Indiana State Prison, for instance, Knight wrote for prison and, later, other publications. He sought, even in the prison columns that were his main early outlet, to cultivate a communicative feedback loop capable of providing a channel through which hospitality could reach those who could not recognize themselves in mainstream American discourse. Knight's feedback loop confirms Jacques Derrida's view that “language is hospitality.”

In Middle English, or rather beginning with Old English and coming down to about 1500, including all works listed by J. E. Wells in his Manual of the Writings in Middle English, there are approximately 553 dream references. By dream references are meant actual dreams or remarks made about dreams which throw light on the attitude of the time toward dreams. Repeated references to the same dream are counted as a single reference. Of these references, 59 occur in Old English and 494 in Middle English. Old Norse is even richer than Middle English in dream references, no less than 530 being found. The large number of dream references in Old Norse is all the more significant in view of the smaller bulk of Old Norse literature in comparison with Middle English.

The question of how far the Middle English metrical romances and their continental prototypes went in portraying realistically the life and times in which they were written and how much of the detail in them is merely literary convention has long been a moot one. W. P. Ker wrote: “The longer romances are really modern novels—studies of contemporary life, characters and emotions, mixed up with adventures more or less surprising,” but added in another place, “the romance writers of the twelfth century did much to make romance into a mechanic art, … reduced the game to a system and left the different romantic combinations and conventions within the reach of almost any 'prentice hand. …” M. L. Clédat wrote: “Les peintures de mœurs chevaleresques, les descriptions de fêtes, de tournois et de combats, nous plaisent encore par elles mêmes lorsqu'elles sont vives et légères, mais elles valent surtout par les renseignements précieux qu'elles nous fournissent sur la vie réelle et sur l'idéal du monde chevaleresque.” There is obviously some vagueness here, and it becomes desirable to separate the realistic from the conventional material in the Middle English metrical romances in order to determine where the art of the romance writers was merely “mechanic” and where they were actually attempting to give “renseignements précieux … sur la vie réelle et sur l'idéal du monde chevaleresque.”