Considered the cornerstone of the American governmental system and an article of political faith for the Founding Fathers, the concept ‘separation of powers’ nevertheless has few rivals for ambiguity. There are wide differences of opinion as to what the Framers intended by the expression. We are told that they embraced the doctrine of Montesquieu, but there is a good deal of doubt as to what he meant and whether they borrowed from him in the first place. Moreover, the question remains: how should one apply a principle from 1787 to the issues of today?.

In 1828 and 1832 James Fenimore Cooper visited England. He expected hostility because he had just written Notions of the Americans which was intended to correct the erroneous statements of British travellers about the United States, but during his visits he was well received and managed to meet many leading literary and political figures. Yet everything was wrong. In 1837 he published a book based on these visits and expressed his dismay at ‘the extent of the malignancy, or the nature of the falsehood, that are industriously circulated here at the expense of America’. It was, he wrote, a country that I could fain like, but whose prejudices and national antipathies throw a chill over all my affections; a country that unquestionably stands at the head of civilization in a thousand things, but which singularly exemplifies a truth we all acknowledge, – how much easier it is to possess great and useful, and even noble qualities, than to display those that are attractive and winning; – a country that all respect, but few love.

On 10 July 1764 the Board of Trade ordered the circulation of a plan for the future management of Indian affairs among the Governors and Indian Superintendents of the North American colonies and requested their comments and criticisms. Diplomatic, territorial and commercial relations with the Indians were to be conducted in future by imperial officials, who would assume powers previously wielded by the colonies. Less than four years later, on 7 March 1768, the Board recommended that responsibility for management of Indian relations be returned to the colonies. The Superintendents retained only the role of conducting diplomatic negotiations with die Indians in cases where more than one colony was concerned and were to be stripped of direct authority. The failure of this attempt to introduce imperial regulation of Indian affairs both reflected and confirmed the intractable problem posed by the west in the years before the Revolution.

The authors are graduates of the University of Southampton. Both are now at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where Alan Day is completing his doctoral research in the History Department and Katherine Day is a special student in the Social Relations Department. They wish to acknowledge with gratitude the many valuable criticisms and suggestions made at various stages of this paper's composition by Dr Philip S. Haffenden of the University of Southampton and Dr Jack P. Greene and the Early American History Seminar of the Johns Hopkins University.

Horace Mann was flattered to be offered the opportunity to succeed the venerable John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives. Adams's long and distinguished service in the House, to which he went after his defeat for a second term in the presidency, was nationally recognized. It would be difficult to fill the shoes of ‘Old Man Eloquent’. The Whigs of the Eighth Congressional District of Massachusetts had to choose a figure of some fame and reputation. Horace Mann's several years of residence in West Newton qualified him for nomination.

A difficulty which faces students of American thought about foreign affairs is the relation between general principles and views of the world on the one hand and attitudes to specific issues of policy on the other. Since the pioneering work of Robert E. Osgood, historians have emphasized the important distinction between those whose primary concern is the protection of American national interests within the existing system of power politics, and those who seek above all to reform the international order in accordance with American liberal ideals. In recent years much attention has been paid to the influence of economic considerations, particularly the desire to promote American foreign trade. However, the relative weight attached to national security, liberal idealism and American economic interests overseas by individual Americans does not entirely account for their differing attitudes to particular questions. For in crucial debates, such as those over the Philippines and the League of Nations, each of these considerations was invoked by some on both sides of the argument. To some extent, the older and more superficial distinction between ‘isolationism’ and ‘anti-isolationism’, while concealing the variety of premises upon which either position could be founded, provides a better basis for predicting the readiness of Americans to favour particular foreign enterprises or commitments. Yet adherence even to these broad traditions has been far from consistent. Thus, while it would be natural to assume that the imperialists of 1898–1900 were more likely than their opponents to favour American intervention in the First World War, it is not clear that this was the case.

The Housing Act of 1949 established in Title I the goal of ‘a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family’. To achieve this goal the Federal Government was to support, by grants and by its legal powers to acquire land, a massive programme of public housing: ‘…it was the first and, until the Act of 1968, the only public housing measure that authorized action that bore some reasonable relation to need’. Nevertheless, the targets set by the 1949 Act for 1954 have still not been reached. Subsequent legislation shifted the emphasis of the programme from public housing to broader schemes of urban renewal, including non-residential development and middle- and high-income housing. The most serious aspect of this neglect of the needs of the poor has been the inadequate management of relocation for those displaced by renewal. For many slum-dwellers in the 1950s ‘urban renewal’ came to mean ‘Negro removal’.

In the year of Lexington, the irascible Dr Johnson wrote to a correspondent: ‘The Americans, sir, are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.’ Extreme in his Tory views, Johnson nevertheless reflected popular sentiment concerning the American colonies and their pretensions to independence, and his bias was to be reflected in many of the writings of the first historians who attempted to account for the late destruction of the first British empire.

Historians of the British response to the American Civil War must be grateful to Dr D. P. Crook for reminding them of the danger of searching too keenly for partisan alignments. It is interesting to find that the ‘little journals’, with their relative freedom from external pressures, offered an appraisal of the secession crisis and the outbreak of war that was reasonably objective. It might, however, be useful to point out that similar views were to be found in the editorial columns of the provincial press, rising to the zenith of its influence in English political life and representing opinion whose intelligence may be debatable, but whose significance was certainly no less than that of the eight journals examined by Dr Crook and whose influence on government policy was perhaps stronger.

‘I believe’, Swinburne wrote in 1875, ‘you know my theory that nothing which can possibly be as well said in prose ought ever to be said in verse’. The clarity of the distinction between prose and verse, though in practice a little wobbly, was felt to be actual in Victorian critical thought. It was not the long narrative poems (Maud, The Ring and the Book, Sordello, The Idylls of the King, The Prelude, Amours de Voyage) which undermined the distinction, but the exquisite poëmes en prose of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. To blur the lines between die different kinds of art one wrote poems titled ‘Symphony in Yellow’ (Wilde), ‘Pastel’ (Symons), ‘Prose pour des Esseintes’ (Mallarmé), titled paintings ‘Nocturne’ (Whistler), or created an art form designed to absorb and surpass all others (Wagner). In Marius the Epicurean Walter Pater proved that there was no viable distinction between the language of poetry and language of prose, and in so doing created a language which was richly and grotesquely unique. To talk of poetry in terms of dance, music and painting was to neutralize the pressure of moral judgement, but this did not efface the idea of the ‘poetic’ as something, in some sense, distinct from prose. Though the lines between the two were softened, they did not disappear, becoming, for the following generation, an increasingly problematic aspect of their own art.

The American nation is presently caught in the throes of its third conservation movement. It is generally considered that the first American conservation movement in the United States took place during the period 1890–1920, with particular emphasis upon the first decade of the twentieth century, and the second was associated with the New Deal and subsequent policies of Franklin Roosevelt in the period 1933–43. The aim of this paper is to compare the development and the underlying philosophies of the present conservation movement in the United States with the growth and guiding principles of its two predecessors, and to follow this analysis through with a somewhat more normative examination of various implications for public policy which come to light.

At the seventy-ninth annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1964, a panel of scholars enlivened one of the sessions with a heated debate over the effects of ethnic assimilation in American culture. The topic of debate, ‘Beyond the Melting Pot: Irish and Jewish Separateness in American Society’, focused on a recent controversial study of ethnic mixture in New York City by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, both sociologists. Glazer and Moynihan in their book Beyond the Melting Pot traced the ‘role of ethnicity’ in the seaboard city. The melting pot ‘did not happen’, they concluded, ‘at least not in New York and, mutatis mutandis, in those parts of America which resemble New York’. This frontal assault on the concept of Americanization, long a cherished ideal in the United States, drew a sharp reaction from several panellists, especially William V. Shannon, editorial writer for die New York Times and author of The American Irish, and Irving Greenberg, professor of history at Yeshiva University. Both Shannon and Greenberg insisted that Irishmen and Jews had indeed been assimilated in American society, either for better or for worse. At this point, the discussion degenerated into the traditional moralistic debate on the merits and demerits of assimilation. Reflecting the divergent views of their colleagues in the history profession, Shannon praised assimilation and Greenberg condemned it.

One of the most interesting and intense of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's various friendships, and one which especially affected the poet, sprang from his association with the American cosmopolite, Washington Allston. Though largely forgotten now, or ignored if remembered, Allston was an artist of great prominence in the first half of the nineteenth century, acclaimed in the United States as the foremost American painter. His writings—consisting mainly of a slender volume of verse, The Sylphs of the Seasons, and an Italian revenge tale, Monaldi—were also highly praised in journals and among the literati. But when the ‘historical style’, a term applied to romantic idealism in painting, went out of fashion, Allston's high standing as painter went with it; nor were his writings of the volume or quality to sustain a literary reputation. There exists no doubt, though, that Allston was the first skilled all-round American painter, for the simple reason that no American before him had painted competently such a broad range of subjects in the different genres. Neither is there any doubt as to Allston's influence upon contemporary artists and writers. He was a catalyst who seemed to stir others to expression wherever he went. His 1839 exhibition of paintings in Boston caused a mild sensation and was written about by Margaret Fuller, James Freeman Clarke, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Elizabeth Peabody. Washington Irving's story ‘The Wife’ in The Sketch-Book was based on Allston's married life.

My major concern in this essay is with the poetry and prose of Charles Olson. However, I wish to approach his work by way of comments passed upon it by both Gabriel Pearson and Martin Dodsworth in a recent critical anthology, edited by the latter, and entitled The Survival of Poetry. In the course of an essay on Robert Lowell, Mr Pearson mounts an attack on what he takes to be Olson's characteristic position, and many of the points that he makes are echoed by the editor in his introductory remarks. It will be my concern to show that neither of these critics deals justly with the scope of Olson's work, or with the vision of man in America that we find in it. Attention in England had been focused almost exclusively on the manifesto ‘Projective Verse’. However, we now have enough texts available to us to be able to set that single work in a wider context, and this is the task that must be achieved if Olson's work is not to suffer the premature dismissal that these critics seem eager to mete out to it. In his essay,‘The Black Mountain Poets’, in the same book, Donald Davie begins this work, but there is much more to be done.

Whitman has often been thought of in the context of modern Symbolism. His conception of poetry as an indefinite art, his general tendency to treat the world of objects in terms of his subjective vision, and the extensive use he made of poetic symbols to present that vision are the aspects that have readily invited comparison with the aesthetics of Symbolism. In his sensibility, of course, Whitman is quite unlike the French Symbolists or their successors in the twentieth century who have taken over some of their characteristic attitudes. But the resemblances, too, in terms of aesthetic belief and method have been mentioned so frequently that an impression prevails among scholars that Whitman, like Poe, was in some ways a forerunner of the Symbolists. Thus, in Symbolism and American Literature, Charles Feidelson attempts to connect Whitman with modern Symbolism. He speaks of ‘the thoroughgoing symbolism of [Whitman's] poetic attitude’ (p. 21) and studies him as part of a dominant Symbolist tradition in American literature, in which Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe and Melville are the other great names. Following a suggestion by Edmund Wilson in his Axel's Castle, Feidelson maintains that, in their typical preoccupations, these writers were closer to ‘the symbolistic aesthetic that produced modern literature’ than to Romanticism (p. 4). But ‘Symbolism’, whether the term is understood in the French sense or in the somewhat wider sense defined by Feidelson, hardly seems to fit Whitman because of certain fundamental differences in his conception of poetry as well as his vision of reality.

In ‘For the Union Dead’ Robert Lowell evokes a landscape which is symbolic in both a social and an historical sense. His aim in doing so seems to be to test the relevance of the traditional ideals of freedom and racial equality in contemporary American society. The landscape is arid and undermined by a garage which stands for the destructive and unreasoned actions of a city enslaved by the motives of affluence. Two major symbols stand together over the abyss of the underground garage, the Statehouse and a bas-relief of Colonel Shaw. The first stands for the actual administration of the ideals of democracy as expressed in the constitution, while the second represents the deepest convictions of American liberalism which motivated the North during the Civil War. This article explores the historical relevance of the death of Colonel Shaw, who was ‘a martyr’ for the cause of die Negro soldiers he led into battle. This is done through historical documents, and through an examination of James Russell Lowell's ‘Memoriae Positum’ which is a celebration of the death of Shaw. The conclusions drawn indicate that Robert Lowell's poem is ambiguous in its treatment of die material relating to Shaw, that he is far less certain as to the relevance of liberalism either to die historical development of American society, or to the disintegrating contemporary scene. Robert Lowell is forced to accept the unreality of claims made for the racial equality, either supposedly realized or hoped for. His vision extends into the future and contemplates social disintegration in the image of atomic destruction which illustrated the destructive power of American idealism in die last war.

In 1938, a play by Arthur Miller, They Too Arise, won a WPA award. The plot focuses upon the personal and political tensions between two brothers and their father, a middle-class manufacturer. In 1968, the first Broadway performance of The Price demonstrated a remarkable continuity which includes All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. For here, in this Ibsenite domestic tale, the disposal of the family furniture becomes another occasion for revealing the relationships, past and present, of two brothers, and the nature of their respective stances towards their father.

In their manual based upon The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner and Timothy Leary discuss the signs of the ‘Third Bardo’ existence in a psychedelic experience in the vocabulary of Ken Kesey's fiction:

Where Tibetans saw demons and beasts of prey, a Westerner may see impersonal machinery grinding, or depersonalizing and controlling devices of different futuristic varieties. Visions of world destruction and hallucinations of being engulfed by destructive powers, and sounds of the mind-controlling apparatus of the ‘combine's fog machinery’, of the gears which move.

In his two novels, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, Kesey has described that sense of the disintegration and death and ultimate rebirth of the ego which lies at the heart of the LSD ‘trip’. Both books are literary metaphors for psychedelic experiences.