For many years critics have been finding fault with Mrs. Browning's rhymes. Asserting that she “richly deserves the place generally accorded her as the foremost poetess of England,” that her Sonnets from' the Portuguese take “rank with Shakespeare's Sonnets and Rossetti's House of Life as one of the three great English sonnet cycles,” that “some of her social poems seem written in blood,” that she is at times “not only original but an equal of the greatest,” and that “her poem ‘The Great God Pan’ is almost perfect,” yet critics repeat the Victorian criticism of her rhymes. Saintsbury considers her “proficient in all the qualities which distinguish the poet from the prose-writer with the exception of ear for rhyme”; and this is what he says of these rhymes: “The dullness or falseness of her ear for consonance of sound was quite unparalleled, and she, with all the advantages of gentle birth, feminine sex, country breeding, and an almost scholarly education, confuses rhymes in a manner usually supposed to be limited to the lower class of cockneys.” Other critics have said her rhymes are “inadmissible,” “eccentric,” “illegitimate,” “slovenly false,” “vicious,” “feeble and commonplace,” “careless and perverse,” “painful,” “really shocking,” and that “few, if any, poets have sinned more grievously or frequently against the laws of metre and rhyme.”

The Romantic Period has generally been regarded as one of enthusiasm for the pre-Augustan poets as well as for the writers of Jacobean and Caroline prose. We recall the ardors of Charles Lamb for the Elizabethan dramatists, and of Lamb and Coleridge for Browne, Burton, and Taylor; we recall, too, the interest of Scott in the ballads, and of Keats in Spenser and Milton.

One tries to transcend something in order to escape it, to dominate it, or to turn it into one's slave. The ambiguity inherent in any attempt to transcend is the obvious fact that one must transcend something; the relation between the two “positions” is therefore dialectical—both are as it were defined against and thus tied to each other. The Christian's fight to bring the body into subjection to the soul, by which the soul may “transcend” the body, illuminates nothing so much as the usurpation of the soul's attention by the body: the soul's activity is controlled by the body in its very attempt to negate this control. Between persons, parties, and nations transcendence takes the form of a power-play, yet the story is the same. Snobbery is an even clearer example and has its most explicit and radical paradigm in the master-slave relationship. The snob and the one he is snobbish to (transcends, dominates) both share the same system of values, that is, both value being “in,” although only one has achieved that envied status. In other words, the snob can only define himself against those before whom he parades his superiority, and so, paradoxically, we can say that the snob needs these to the exact degree that he wishes to reject them. Those below him, the slaves whom the “master” beats, are like him insofar as they want to be “in” so that they too can “beat” those below them as they themselves have been beaten. They both love and hate the master: love him because they want to be like him and hate him because they are not and are beaten by him. Likewise the master both “loves” and hates his slaves, insofar as the hate which motivates his transcendence is dependent on their continual presence to him as that which he is transcending. If we substitute for social snobbery a scale of transcendence in which praise and power are the controlling values, we will have both the controlling scheme of the action of Coriolanus and a good part of its theme as well.

Though the development of novelistic prose in medieval Castilian literature has been traditionally associated with the encyclopedic works of Alfonso el Sabio and those of his nephew, Juan Manuel, author of the Conde Lucanor, the stylistic differences between these two writers are sufficiently important to indicate the existence of a transitional period characterized by the absorption of classical rhetoric into the mainstream of religiously oriented didactic literature. An analysis of the critically neglected works of Sancho IV, second son of Alfonso and guardian to the young Juan Manuel, reveals the intermediate stages in the transformation of impersonal Alfonsine historical narrative to the highly anecdotal mode of Juan Manuel and subsequently affirms Sancho's role in Castilian letters while stressing Juan Manuel's clear genius for synthesizing the major literary currents of his age. (In Spanish)

If, as Professor Adams complains, Milton's Comus has been “overread,” the chief reason is that we are still trying to find out what the masque means. In spite of the wide acceptance given to Professor Woodhouse's theological interpretation of the work, critics keep twisting the dials, trying to sharpen the focus. The difficulty is that none of the adjustments tried so far brings the whole narrative into focus at once.

When the Japanese Nobel Laureate in literature KenzaburŌ Ōe visited Taiwan for a symposium held in his honor in December 2009, he hardly anticipated the political controversies into which he was thrown. Even before the conference, politicians accused the Academia Sinica, the organizing institution, of kowtowing to China by reducing a trilateral symposium involving Japan, Taiwan, and China to a “cross-strait event” and by replacing the Taiwanese novelist who was to act as Ōe's interlocutor with one more acceptable to China. Aside from the China factor, the underhanded politics tapped into ethnic tensions in Taiwan and the problematic national identity of Taiwan. While the original interlocutor, Li Ang, and her substitute, Zhu Tienwen, are critically acclaimed women novelists just a few years apart in age, Li is of Minnan ancestry and Zhu a second-generation Chinese mainlander whose father fled with the Chinese Nationalist or Kuomintang (KMT) government to Taiwan in 1949 after losing China to the communists. More important, Li is a postcolonial writer, whereas Zhu deploys postmodernism to resist decolonization.

From the mid-1960s onward, Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian writers have turned to the question of Palestine as a model of political and aesthetic innovation. Taking the Moroccan cultural journal Souffles-Anfas as an early, paradigmatic example of the literary turn to Palestine in the Maghreb, I argue that writers such as Abdellatif Laâbi and Abdelkebir Khatibi used Palestine as a springboard for “cultural decolonization,” reactivating global anticolonial discourses in order to articulate a relational, cross-colonial Maghrebi identity. Focusing on discussions of language, poetic form, and cultural autonomy, I show that Palestine served as a point of reference in debates on postcolonial Maghrebi culture. Without muting the ethical pitfalls inherent in representing a heterogeneous anticolonial struggle in a postcolonial context, I take this example of cross-colonial poetics as an invitation to rethink along multidirectional, transnational lines the way we approach Maghrebi and, more generally, postcolonial literature and culture.

Whether or not The Dynasts is the greatest work in English literature of the last generation it is undoubtedly the most engrossing for the student of literary forms. English literature does not on the whole raise questions of form; we have been content to leave that to the Germans. But with The Dynasts we have for once out of our own native workshop a poem which drives the mind back to all the old problems that have dogged epic and dramatic literature through the centuries. And besides the old problems it raises a score of new ones which will stimulate enterprise and innovation in many a writer of to-day and to-morrow. If at the present moment the necessity of analyzing The Dynasts, complicated as the task may be, is not apparent to the reader of English literature at large, it will be apparent at no distant date.

Among the various features of Anglo-Saxon verse technique, none has so successfully eluded explanation as the use of expanded verses. Impetus for a further investigation of the expanded verses is provided by certain conjectural remarks made by Magoun in his highly provocative initial article on Anglo-Saxon oral verse-making: “There is perhaps much that will never be known about the origin and special function, if any, of the expanded or hypermetric verses, but a casual survey suggests that, whereas the second measure of each verse seems to be formulaic and out of its context would form a complete verse, the organization of the first measure would appear to be somewhat different, perhaps somewhat less rigid in structure, thus perhaps allowing the singer certain freedoms not available in a normal verse.” This essay will follow up the suggestions made by Magoun and will re-examine the expanded verses from the point of view, not of their metrics, but rather of their formulaic structure. The evidence will show, I think, that the superior singers allow themselves far less freedom in the opening measure than may appear to be the case from a cursory analysis.

In Wordsworth's language a voice as enduring as epitaphic inscription interpenetrates a writing as immediate as the breath of speech. While voice might seem the appropriate linguistic ideal for a poet who saw himself as “a man speaking to men,” Wordsworth's desire for a more durable language produces a competing “insistence of the letter.” “Images of voice” in nature exist in a “strength / Of usurpation” with the written characters that nature imprints. The epitaphic text emerges as the intersection of voice and letter, in which the autobiographical subject attempts to constitute itself in textual form. Wordsworth's meeting with the blind Beggar strikingly illustrates the interpenetration of voice, self, and text. Writing, for Wordsworth, is not the death of voice but the consummation: it is the accomplishment of voice.

One incident in the life of David Garrick—Shakespeare's Priest—has subsequently evoked the harshest kind of criticism even from his professed admirers, namely, his alteration of Hamlet. James Boaden, who prefaced an edition of the actor's letters in 1831 with a biographical sketch, wrote:

If there be any one act of his management which we should wish to blot out from these pages it is his rash violation of the whole scheme of Shakespeare's Hamlet … All the contrivances of Shakespeare by which he added absence from the scene to the melancholy irresolution of the character were rendered abortive. It became as much a monodrame as Timon; and the passive Hamlet was kept on the rack of perpetual exertion. His very speeches were trimmed up with startling exclamations and furious resolves: even Yoric himself was thrown out of the play to render the wit and pathos of Sterne inapplicable and unintelligible. It was an actor's mutilation of all parts but his own.

Speaking of the “plan of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’” in Chapter 14 of his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge pointed out that while Wordsworth was to deal with “the wonders of the world before us,” he himself was to try to connect the human truth of “our inward nature” with the “shadows of imagination.” The fruitfulness of this connection is evidenced by “The Ancient Mariner”; its aesthetic basis was analyzed by Coleridge at a later date: “The romantic poetry,” he decided, appeals “to the imagination rather than to the senses and to the reason as contemplating our inward nature, the working of the passions in their most retired recesses.” By “exciting our internal emotions,” the poet “acquires the right and privilege of using time and space as they exist in the imagination, obedient only to the laws which the imagination acts by.” Philosophically, Coleridge's transcendentalism is obviously responsible for this assertion of the superiority of the mind over nature; he had remarked its psychological basis as early as 1805:

In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking for, a symbolical language, for something within me that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phenomenon were the dim awakening of a forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature. (Anima Poetae, p. 136).

Swift recognized that “slavery” was an ambivalent term: on one hand, slavery can be seen as a biological imperative—a natural condition of the innately servile; on the other hand, slavery can be seen as a political accident— a circumstance imposed from without by those with the will and power to oppress. Swift consistently characterized the Irish as “slaves” and called the relationship of Ireland to England “slavery.” In the case of the Irish, Swift feared that their slavery, which may have begun as external oppression, would eventually become an intrinsic part of Irish character. If Swift's observations on slavery in Ireland are applied to the slavery of the Yahoos to the Houyhnhnms in Book iv of Gulliver's Travels, the question of whether slavery is a matter of nature or nurture also arises, for there is evidence in Book iv to suggest that the Yahoos were as rational as Gulliver when they arrived in Houyhnhnmland.

Critics have always been struck by the death scene that concludes The Turn of the Screw and, being struck, have given us a variety of interpretations—psychological, religious, poetic; but they have never accounted for the improbability that Miles—whose good health and sound heart are never questioned in the tale—should die of heart failure. In James's other stories concluding with the death of a young boy (“The Pupil” and “The Author of Beltraffio”) we are prepared by earlier accounts of the boy's health to accept his final death. Not so with Miles. We are not even prepared to find him bewildered and demoralized by the series of embarrassing questions put to him by his governess: Miles is presented as remarkably well-poised for a ten-year-old.

Whitman's “Song of Myself” has long been considered a loosely organized, perhaps even chaotic poem which is held together, if at all, by his own robust personality. He himself may have contributed to this concept of the poem. Untitled when it appeared in the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, it was called “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American” in the 1856 edition; “Walt Whitman” in the 1860 edition, and was given the present title in the 1881 edition. This frequent change of title together with the many revisions made in the numbering of the sections and in the text itself suggests one of two possibilities: either Whitman was uncertain, perhaps confused as to the basic nature of what he was writing; or he was struggling to perfect a work of art the execution of which had fallen short of the conception. Too frequently the critics have assumed as self-evident the first of these possibilities. Inability to find a structure in “Song of Myself” has resulted, I believe, from a failure to find a center of relevancy, an “informing idea,” to which the parts of the poem may be related. It is the purpose of this paper to propose such a center, to show how it gives structure to the poem, and to examine the parts of the poem in detail to test their relevancy to this central “informing idea.”

The Lyric, it has been generally thought, is of all poetic genres the most spontaneous and artless, which may explain why relatively little attention has been paid to its art. Unity, it is agreed, is essential; yet, aside from references to the unifying function of the refrain, attention has been centered almost exclusively upon unity of idea or prose sense. As to the part played by style, diction, prosody, imagery, and rhetorical devices in achieving unity and conveying what the writer had to express, little is said in discussions of this or, indeed, of other kinds of poetry. It may, therefore, be illuminating to examine a number of well-known lyrics to see if all are formless cris du cœur or if some reveal structure as well as emotion, and if repetition, parallelism, correspondences in meter or language, and other devices, prosodie or rhetorical, seem to be used for the sake of unifying the piece and of expressing its “meaning.” Shelley's songs are admirably suited to this purpose since they are numerous, varied, and familiar, and since they are generally regarded, by admirers and detractors alike, as approaching the beau ideal of the lyric: spontaneous, formless, and vague.

Sowohl in der Literatur über Klopstock als auch in der Literatur über Stefan George wird heute immer wieder darauf hingewiesen, daß Klopstock Stefan George und seinem Kreis weit mehr als ein durch Schule und Universität überlieferter Name war. Klopstock gehörte zu den dichterischen Vorgängern Georges, zu den anerkannten Kultgestalten des Kreises, denen George sich in seinem eigenen künstlerischen Wirken verpflichtet fühlte und deren Bedeutung für die deutsche Dichtung er hervorhob. Norbert von Hellingrath bleibt das Verdienst, als erster Literarhistoriker auch die innere Verwandtschaft Georgescher und Klopstockscher Dichtung erkannt und formuliert zu haben. In dieser Erkenntnis folgten ihm Hans Gerhard, Claude David, Karl August Schleiden, Jean Murat, Eric A. Blackall und Paul Gerhard Klussmann. Diese Arbeit konzentriert sich im folgenden insbesondere auf das Phänomen, daß von einem Dichter des 20. Jahrhunderts und seinem Kreis ein deutscher Dichter des 18. Jahrhunderts wieder in seiner besonderen Bedeutung betont und gewürdigt wurde, und sie soll sich Einzelheiten zuwenden, die es rechtfertigen, eine innere Beziehung Georges zu Klopstock anzunehmen.

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, like Malraux and other French writers of the nineteen thirties, saw the forces of history as a form of tragic fate. In Le Feufollet he sets forth the tragic destiny of a decadent drug addict who is a victim of his era's decline. Drieu's use of a Racinian structure creates a sense of overwhelming tragic inevitability, but, in the final analysis, his attempt at creating a tragedy based on the decadent's self-destruction is not entirely successful. Rather, the novel appears as an inversion of tragedy in which the glorification of nonbeing foreshadows Drieu's adherence to fascism.

Near the end of their lives, the poets Jorge Luis Borges and Seamus Heaney both translated the Old English poem Deor. Medieval Germanic literature was an object of deep ambivalence for these poets, and their identification with Deor, the poem's eponymous scop, charges their translations with a sense of preemptive self-mourning. Analyzing the structure of the poem, particularly its refrain, “That passed over, this can too,” reveals a chronological framework in which the reader's temporality forms a legible outer limit enclosing the poem as a whole. The poem's acceptance of its own finitude resonates with the work Borges and Jacques Derrida produced late in their careers, as they tried to understand the afterlife and independence of their own creations. Just as the poet Deor was outlasted by the poem that ostensibly bears his name, the authorial name survives and mourns the mortal author.

Book v of The Ring and the Book affords us a view of Guido Franceschini very different from that provided by his second monologue. This difference is accountable to the Active rhetorical method that Guido employs in confronting the judges at his murder trial. In Book XI, having failed in his attempt to prolong life through fiction, Guido resorts to what he calls a more “voluble rhetoric” of the soul, thus becoming accessible to us for the first time in the same way that we see the other speakers in the poem. An analysis of Guido's fiction in Book V, especially his rendering of Caponsacchi, Pompilia, and himself, as the hero, heroine, and wronged husband, respectively, of popular medieval and renaissance literature reveals a conception of art as deception, contrary to Browning's informing belief in art as a means of arriving at truth by heightening rather than distorting reality. A comparison of Book XI with the earlier monologue indicates that, in addition to making plain the enormity of his villain's evil nature, Browning uses Guido's second monologue as an implicit repudiation of what he considers to be the specious theory of art that Guido relies upon in Book v.