Cultural studies has tended to neglect poetic texts, but poetry is in fact well suited to provoke classroom debates concerning the cultural construction of the aesthetic object, as Blaise Cendrars's Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (Nineteen Elastic Poems) confirms. Bakhtin's notion of the heteroglossic helps to demonstrate that Cendrars's poems are also “rejoinders” in a dialogue with their institutional other: advertising. But Cendrars does not merely claim advertising as poetic material; he identifies poetry as a form of advertisement. Cendrars suggests that the symbolic capital of poetry cannot exist unless the poem brings attention to itself by means of a practice that it posits, paradoxically, as its other. However, the fact that poetry is constructed by advertising its difference does not make poetry equivalent to advertising. Cultural studies reveals the institutional construction of poetry, but only close textual analysis can highlight the semiotic distinctions between poetry and advertising that institutional boundaries engender.

Just as Defoe had maintained that the novel could surpass the pulpit in encouraging morality, so Richardson explicitly declared his intention of making Clarissa nothing less than an instrument of reviving the Christian religion:

The known facts of the several versions of the Arcadia have been presented many times. Briefly, the original version was widely circulated in manuscript but never printed. Sidney commenced an elaborate revision, which was left unfinished at his death in 1586. In 1590 the revised portion was published, superintended, without much doubt, by Fulke Greville. In 1593 appeared a new edition, supervised by Mary, Countess of Pembroke, which consisted of the revised portion with the addition of the third, fourth, and fifth books from the earlier manuscript version to complete the story.

Theobald, thus weak and ignorant, thus mean and faithless, thus petulant and ostentatious, by the good luck of having Pope for his enemy, has escaped, and escaped alone, with reputation, from this undertaking“ of editing Shakespeare. In these words Johnson touched on one of the more troublesome ironies of literary history, the fact that such highly gifted men as Pope and Warburton had failed to achieve Shakespearean texts that their contemporaries and scholarly posterity could praise. Pope's Shakespeare, printed but twice, had been buried by Theobald; and Warburton's Shakespeare, printed but once, had been interred by Edwards. The question for Johnson was whether his own forthcoming edition would suffer a similar fate.

Mörike's only novel, Maler Nolten, was published in August 1832; the conception of the story dates from 1827; some writing was done in 1828, and the manuscript was finished in 1831. By 1850, probably earlier though not recorded, Mörike began to entertain the idea of revising his novel; and from that time till his death in 1875 he worked on the revision intermittently and in desultory fashion, though, as his correspondence shows, at times he regarded it as his main literary concern. Thus for a quarter of a century the revision of Maler Nolten was on the author's mind. His frequent illnesses and in the latter part of the period the domestic infelicities which eventually resulted in separation from his wife were contributory causes of delay. Doubtless in the main, however, he was hindered by the inherent difficulty of the undertaking. At his death he left the task still unfinished.

Tennyson's habits as a writer–composing longer works backward from a foreordained conclusion, stationing lyric speakers in a terminal situation– justify approaching his oeuvre as a poetry of aftermath. An obsession with the inevitable, which underlies his weaknesses in presenting character and in advancing narrative or dramatic action, also supports his compensatory strengths: evocation of atmospheric mood and sheer rhetorical splendor. Tennyson's rhetorical inevitability corresponds to intuitive convictions about the inevitability of the self's place in the world. His incapacity wholly to accept or resist the doom of the self engenders his typical melancholy; it also may explain the success he enjoyed as a Victorian spokesman. Never acquiring more than a fitful conceptual grasp of the fatality that was his subject, Tennyson conceived it instead in musical, often rhythmic, terms. He thus devised in “measured language” unsurpassed means of embodying and sharing the sense of a humanly definitive doom.

A recent survey estimates that there are. today in the six New England states alone well over a million persons of French-Canadian descent, the overwhelming majority of whom understand and speak French natively. At a time when increased and improved knowledge of modern foreign languages is patently needed, this vast pool of native speakers and potential teachers of French constitutes an increasingly valuable linguistic resource. The Franco-American Institute held at Bowdoin College in the summer of 1961 under the terms of the National Defense Education Act sought to exploit more fully in the national interest this New England French resource. The Institute marked the first time in history that an ethnic group was accorded federal support in its struggle to preserve its linguistic heritage—a sharp divergence from official efforts at intensive Americanization following World War I. It was also the first concerted effort made in this country by language teachers of any nationality to come to grips in a realistic way with the problem of teaching the standard form of a language to a group of persons whose second language is non-standard. The central problem faced by the Institute was the unquestioned right of French-Canadian speech to be recognized as a respectable means of communication. All due respect was accorded to this linguistically-sound fact, but the Institute nevertheless took the position that the national interest demands the teaching of standard French in all U. S. schools today.

Wallace Steven's later poetry traces the multiple investments of desire that impel a world in perpetual metamorphosis. The works from “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” onward constitute an unlimited and ceaselessly repeated affirmation of difference, heterogeneity, and change. The evanescent movements of this poetry can never be reduced to sameness or self-identity, but they produce partial and temporary fixities of subjectivity and signification as local effects. Steven's radical perspectivism and his rejection of concepts of identity and substance work to subvert traditional dualisms of subject and object, language and world, and assertion and denial. But this work of displacement is never merely negative and destructive. Stevens's later poetry celebrates what Nietzsche calls “the eternal joy of becoming,” and in so doing it exceeds the limits of Western humanist thought.

John Leland, sixteenth-century antiquary and defender of the Arthurian legend against Polydore Vergil, is probably better known to historians than to literary scholars. Nevertheless he was an assiduous writer of Latin verse during most of his life, published seven volumes of poetry before his death, and left in manuscript a large collection of epigrams and other occasional verses. In a Bodleian manuscript in Leland's own hand (MS. Top. gen. c. 4, p. 301) we have evidence that he had himself collected these poems for preservation, for he says there, in connection with a poem of his on Chaucer, “in libris meorum epi-grammaton his uersibus eius gloriae assurgo.” This manuscript collection seems not to have been preserved, even in the generation following Leland's death. Our present knowledge of Leland's poemata, aside from those printed during his lifetime, is based upon a manuscript in the hand of John Stow (Bodleian MS. Tanner 464. iv) and a printed edition of 1589 edited by Thomas Newton. A note from Newton to Stow, written on the outside of Stow's manuscript, shows that he had examined this manuscript, but his text is obviously based on a different one. Not only are there many differences in the readings of individual poems, but there is also the fact that the Stow manuscript contains twenty-eight poems not included in the printed edition.

By the end of the fourteenth century the institution of chivalry seemed more brilliant than ever before. It had covered itself with glory during the long years of the struggle between France and England, numbering among its heroes such exemplars of knighthood as the Black Prince and King John of France, Sir John Chandos and Bertrand du Guesclin. During the lull that occurred in the last years of the century, monarchs and princes, freed from the galling restrictions of war, vied with one another in the great mediæval pageant, the tournament; court life under the youthful Charles VI in extravagant reaction to the bourgeois régime of Charles le Sage, was once more aristocratic and magnificent; knights rode gaily forth on expeditions against the infidels or wandered off to foreign lands to join in jousts and tourneys.

That French literature exerted some influence upon the author of Piers Plowman has been recognized since the time of Thomas Warton, who, in his History of English Poetry, pointed out the similarity between Langland's vision of Antichrist and Huon de Méri's Tournoiement de l'Antéchrist. This influence had not been examined with any particularity, however, until Miss Dorothy Owen, of the University of London, made an illuminating study of Piers Plowman in comparison with some earlier and some contemporary French allegories. The French pieces used for this comparison are Le Roman de Carité by the Reclus de Moilliens; Le Songe d'Enfer by Raoul de Houdenc; Le Roman de la Rose; Huon de Méri's Tournoiement de l'Antéchrist; Rutebeuf's Voie de Paradis; Guillaume de Deguileville's Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine; Le Salut d'Enfer, and De Dame Guile. Miss Owen has shown certain correspondences between the English poem and the French allegories studied, but in no case, I believe, has she been able to establish a definite connection. Students of Piers Plowman know, however, that it is very difficult to trace any of Langland's allegories to certain sources. It is doubtful whether the source of any passage of considerable length in Piers Plowman has ever been convincingly identified.

Professor E. M. Clark in his edition of The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, and the present writer in a previous article have incidentally called attention to Milton's employment of the principle of the mixed or balanced state in his venture in commonwealth construction. I wish now to develop the thesis that this principle was a basic one in the poet's political thought, and that a study of its relationship to the development of his ideas yields significant results, not only for his attitude toward episcopacy, monarchy, and dictatorship, but for an understanding of the point at which he finally arrived in The Ready and Easy Way.

The tone of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Parts I and II, has long troubled critics who have approached the plays as either tragedies or romances. This article argues, on the basis of our responses to Marlowe’s language, that each play attempts to define itself as a romance by asserting the mastery of the imagination over the material world and thus denying the effects of tragic realism. Marlowe creates a language that invites us to indulge in the glorification of worldly achievement in spite of the questionable morality of worldliness. In Part I, Marlowe demonstrates that the world of romance is a world of the imagination and, as such, free from the tragic concerns of a problematic humanity. In Part II, Marlowe moves closer to tragedy by exploring the possibilities of romance within a world where the imagination does not triumph and where the attitude toward the romantic hero is left ambiguous.

The article brings to light from the University of Illinois Wells Archive a substantial repressed episode from Kipps. In the episode, Masterman, the dying socialist, visits Kipps and his wife, Ann. In the course of his visit, which ends with his death, Master-man expresses his socialistic and utopian views of society. Masterman finds practical application of his views in the house Kipps is having built. But a single house proves too confining for Masterman's utopian visions and, by the time of his death, he has designed a plan for an entire utopian state. Masterman's views were to bring Kipps to an increased social and self-awareness that he never achieves in the published version of the novel. The episode is of literary value in itself, but more valuable in terms of what its omission means to the tone and structure of Kipps, and of still wider value as historical testimony to the nature of Wells's struggle to reconcile the claims of art and of propaganda in Kipps and generally through his major novels in the years from 1900 to 1910.

To propose to consider the construction of an ideal or standard undergraduate curriculum, even to the extent only of tentative approach, must seem, at first thought, rather rash and even a bit foolish; the attainment of any satisfactory result seems extremely difficult, and the result promises to be useless when attained. Yet when we consider in connection with the undergraduate years the vast number of the works of English literature and the great body of knowledge concerning them, the question must inevitably arise, What out of all this great mass of material should be presented to the undergraduate? in what order, and by what methods should it be presented? Again, when we consider that the undergraduate years are but a single stage in the educational life, with distinct limitations, with other stages before and after, and that the curricula of these other stages, especially the secondary school period, have recently been the subject of much discussion having for its aim the construction of a standard or ideal curriculum, it does not seem impossible that some profit may come from such a discussion as that proposed. If it be true that that which has not been treated ought to be treated, then there is ample justification for the choice of this subject. If one may trust the evidence of pedagogical literature this particular subject has not been treated to any great extent. A somewhat careful examination of pedagogical bibliography has failed to disclose a single title bearing directly upon it, and my pedagogical colleagues are unable to refer me to any. To rush in where even pedagogic angels fear to tread surely gives promise of folly; the rashness of the attempt may pardon the folly. With a full appreciation, then, of the difficulties in the way, but with confidence that there are among us idealists to maintain that what is theoretically true must be practicable, provided the means can be found, I venture upon some consideration of the question, What material out of the great field of English literature, including works of literature, history of literature, and criticism, can best be given to the college student in the several years of his undergraduate life?

The Dantean formulas with desiderative se have recently attracted the attention of several reputable scholars and have given occasion to a lively discussion. Nicholson in Romania, LXI (1935), 3 ff., proposed to abandon the traditional etymology Ital. sẹt<Lat. sī, and suggested Ital. sẹt < Lat. sǐt. Among those who accepted Mr. Nicholson's conclusion are: E. C. Armstrong, MLN., LI, 68; K. McKenzie, Italica, XIII, 70, who closely examined the passages of Dante, and finally Miss Lograsso, Italica, XV, 152. He was strongly opposed, on the other hand, by E. B. Place, Hisp. Rev., V, (1937), 259, to whom he replied in the same journal, VI, 250 ff., and finally by L. Spitzer, Romania, LXV (1939), 290 ff., who defended the old etymology Ital. sẹt < Lat. sī. Having read the arguments of both camps, and having arrived at the conclusion that this usage of Dantean sẹt cannot be explained either by Lat. sǐ or by s࿐t, I venture to express my opinion on the subject.

The Faust legend is the Hydra of literature. One of its heads pops up in the story of Simon Magus, its body reaches from New Testament times to the days of Goethe, while a new head has just sprouted in Stephen Philips's latest drama. The Faust story has all the ear-marks of a legend endowed with eternal youth. More than three hundred years ago the most popular tragedy on the London stage was Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, while the play which is creating the greatest interest to-day on our American stage is a modern treatment of the Faust legend under the title of Der Teufel. So much for the absorbing interest which the story has (and ever will have) in its dramatic form.

To the uninitiated the name of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu may arouse amusement or disbelief. Why so long and mouth-filling a name? Before her marriage she was Lady Mary Pierrepont; she owed her title to her father, who was a peer with the successive ranks of Earl, Marquess, and Duke. Her husband was Edward Wortley Montagu, Esquire; and while she remained Lady, he remained untitled. In her own day there were other peers' daughters named Lady Mary, but her intellectual brilliance and her connection with Alexander Pope and his circle gave her the dubious honor of being recognized in print as the Lady Mary.