Among the poems Emily Dickinson wrote in her most productive year, 1862, are two which gain particular interest from the fact that she returned to them at a considerably later date. Comparison of the early and late versions offers revealing insights into her development. To her poem about a hummingbird, “Within my Garden rides a Bird / Upon a single Wheel—”, she returned, probably early in 1879, to produce a much better poem on the same subject: “A Route of Evanescence / With a revolving Wheel. …” Condensing twenty lines to eight, she transformed a slack little narrative about the bird, her dog and herself, into a brilliant image of the bird's visual impact. Cutting out the personal pronoun, the dog and the philosophic debate, she managed to convey directly her sense of domestic miracle. The two poems appear separately, as numbers 500 and 1463, in Johnson's three-volume edition of The Poems (1955) and thus are taken over into his recent one-volume edition of The Complete Poems (1960).

From Langbaine's time it has been usual to consider the play How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad as drawn directly from Cinthio's Hecatommithi, book III, novel 5. But Riche had translated this novel and made it the sixth history of his Farewell to Military Profession some years before the drama appeared, and, as Riche's translation was no doubt easily accessible, the author of the play is more likely to have used his version than the Italian. It would be hard to decide which is the immediate source, however, for the double reason that Riche usually follows his original almost phrase by phrase, occasionally enlarging a compressed Italian expression into what amounts to an explanation or illustration of the original, and that, where the author of How a Man May Choose has followed his source closely, he is so far from copying the language that his phrasing may as well be his own translation as his adaptation of Riche's. But the slight evidence is all in favor of his borrowing from Riche. For instance, where Cinthio reads, “Aselgia … indusse un suo drudo a riuelare a di Agata, che il marito auelenata l'hauena,” we find in Riche:

“Wherefore she reveiled his speeches unto a ribalde of hers, such a one as supplied her want of that which Gonsales alone, nor ten suche as he were able to satisfie her withall, and induced hym to appeache hym for that facte. … This companion accused Gonsales upon his owne wordes unto the freendes of Agatha,” etc.

Although Stefan George's unyielding protest against the contemporary theatre lasted from the time of his graduation from the Ludwig-Georg Gymnasium in Darmstadt (1888) until his death, his hopes for its reform and his gradual disillusionment are generally little known, since his sphere of influence was restricted to the realm of lyrical poetry. This limitation was apparently both natural and logical for George, whose peculiar genius was that of the lyricist. But it was not entirely voluntary at first, for in his formative years he had been fascinated by the world of the theatre.

When read in the context of the 1840's, “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” is seen to be neither an explicitly anti-Catholic poem nor a simple historical construct. Much of its bent and many of its details had previously been expressed by so vigorously polemical a Catholic writer as Pugin; they appear again later in Ruskin's pages. Browning's concern rather—and this he shares with Newman, as well as Pugin and Ruskin—was to search out in the past the roots of his own age. The corruption of spirit that he discerns in the Renaissance he also recognizes as extending into his time. The ethos represented by Saint Praxed is dead; the modern world has begun; the qualities of the Bishop are the qualities of Browning's reader. The same historicizing of the past informs “My Last Duchess”, which dramatizes in the deadly embrace of the Duke and the Duchess the destruction of the old order at the hands of the new. The Duchess survives as a frozen portrait, Saint Praxed as no more than a confused and ineffectual memory. But despite the coherence of his analysis, and unlike Ruskin and Pugin, Browning refused to enter the lists with a programme of his own.

As Holtzmann has shown the Hildebrandslied as we now have it is a copy from an older manuscript. That it was not written in its present form from memory is seen in the fact that the mistakes are those of sight. For example, Hiltibraht occurs six times for Hiltibrant, man for inan, unti for miti, etc. The errors show that the writer or writers did not fully understand what they were writing, and that their copying was mechanical. It follows that the manuscript from which they wrote did not differ materially from their copy, or in other words, that the linguistic confusion was already present. This confusion, however, cannot be entirely explained unless with Kögel we assume that at an earlier time there was a copy from memory.

In 1613 Quevedo left Spain to join his friend, Pedro Téllez Girón, Duke of Osuna and at that time Viceroy of Sicily. Two years later Quevedo was chosen by the Sicilian Parliament to present in person the triennial contribution of 300,000 ducats to the King of Spain. During the eight months he spent in Madrid, the satirist gained a wealth of experience in intrigue and practical politics. The purpose of this article is to edit with brief comment letters recently uncovered in Spain which bear on this sojourn in Madrid. These documents clarify the nature of Quevedo's relationship with the Duke of Osuna, facilitate the analysis of his experiences at the Court and reactions to current political practices, and make possible the rectification of various misconceptions. No attempt will be made below to restate what is already known about these years of Quevedo's life.

Considering how little T. S. Eliot has written about the novel, one is especially struck by the frequency with which the name of Henry James gets into his criticism. Eliot has left little doubt as to his admiration for James, having referred to him once as “the most intelligent man of his generation,” and on another occasion having placed him among “the greatest novelists.” More than one student of Eliot has shown the influence of James's works on his poetry, but virtually nothing has been said about the nature and validity of Eliot's critical remarks on a writer who has been a stock property of his mind for the last half century. It is the aim of this study to examine the responses that one of America's major novelists has called forth from the most influential critic of our time.

Wallace Stevens noted in his journal that while aphorisms are never believed for very long they help us make brief, intensely felt discoveries about ourselves; there he made a connection between his love of aphoristic expression and his theory of human perception of reality as a perception of fragments, never the whole. Exploring the nature and variety of his aphorisms as a manifestation of this concept is important to the understanding of his poems. The tendency to experience life as fragments is, on the one hand, a centripetal tendency akin to aphoristic expression, since in each case one momentarily pulls experience into a self-contained unit. But such moments invariably give rise to a centrifugal tendency, an encompassing of the plenitude of experience in all its contradictory fullness. The juxtaposition of these opposing tendencies lies at the heart of Stevens' aphoristic technique and of the tension in much of his poetry.

That Philip Freneau, “the poet of the American Revolution,” outspokenly devoted to the cause of freedom and the democratic ideal, and plunging into the midst of the political activities of his time with an ardor that forswore all compromise, bears a strong spiritual kinship to the blind poet of the Commonwealth certainly no one familiar with the stormy public careers of the two would for a moment deny. That this extended in Freneau's earlier poetry to an actual literary discipleship has been more than once stated, but illustrated only in the most general terms. The temptation to cite concrete examples of the youthful poet's indebtedness to Paradise Lost, extending from borrowed phrase to actual paraphrase, is difficult to resist; “The Rising Glory of America,” “The History of the Prophet Jonah,” and “The Monument of Phaon” in particular prove rich ground and practically unturned. However, in the interest of exactness, as well as correction of what seems a mistaken attitude, it will be well to restrict the present discussion to one poem. Upon the publication of “The Power of Fancy” (1786) Freneau appended to line 33, “See's this earth a distant star,” the note “Milton's Paradise Lost B. ii, v, 1052.” This allusion to Satan's viewing “this pendant world, in bigness as a star” has been several times cited as evidence of the American's debt, but, strangely enough, with little effort to find substantiation in the matter and manner of the poem itself.

“Tous les Janus de Rome ne suffiraient pas à représenter toutes les oppositions, tous les contrastes—ou, si l'on veut, toutes les synthèses qu'il y a dans Goethe. C'est presque un jeu de les trouver en lui, et ce jeu fait même douter s'il ne s'était pas fait un système de cultiver exactement les contraires”.

In Goethes Naturphilosophie spielt das Polaritätssymbol eine bedeutende Rolle. Ewald A. Boucke, dem wir die grundlichste und umfassendste Darstellung der Bedeutung dieses Symbols auch für Goethes Weltanschauung im weiteren Sinne verdanken, zeigt im einzelnen, dafi die bei Goethe von Anfang an vorhandene vitalistisch-dynamische Grundanschauung teils in selbständig-spontaner Entwicklung, teils infolge “anregender Momente” theoretischer Art, teils infolge naturwissenschaftlicher Studien allmahlich so weit gedieh, daß er in der Einleitung in die Propyläen bereits im Jahre 1797 in der Polaritatsidee ein allgemeines Naturgesetz vermutete. Da Goethe sich das Naturgeschehen als das Resultat eines räumlich und zeitlich verlaufenden Antagonismus von dynamischen Kraften vorstellte, zugleich aber das gesamte Naturgeschehen als einheitlich-organischen Prozeß zu ecfassen strebte, glaubte er die mannigfachen Formen dieses Antagonismus unter dem Polaritatssymbol als einer prägnanten “Formel” zusammenfassen zu konnen. Weiterhin weist Boucke nach, daß Goethe sich nicht damit begnugte, naturwissenschaftliche Phänomene verschiedenster Art mit seiner Polaritätsidee in Verbindung zu bringen, sondern sie auch seit etwa 1800 gleichnisartig auf weite Gebiete des sittlichen und geistigen Lebens in Anwendung brachte.

When, in 1892, Galdós startled Spanish literary circles by his decision to turn dramatist, few of either his supporters or his detractors were aware of the fact that as far back as his student days he had already carried on a serious flirtation with the drama. Certainly in the confused discussions which his dramatic appearance as playwright precipitated in the press of Madrid, no more than an occasional passing reference was made to his previous essays at the theater. It seems that only two newspapers gave adequate space to Galdós' early preparation for the career of a dramatist and these reproduced an article by Eusebio Blasco, originally published in France. Because they are pertinent to our discussion, the principal facts in Blasco's article merit repetition.

The Contending Lovers is a folk-tale of love rivalry— but of love rivalry with a difference. Because it has certain uncommon distinctions, among them a provocative love problem which is usually left wholly unsolved, I have previously attempted to show in brief fashion its affinity with Chaucer's Parlement of Foules and to prove by especial reference to Il Paradiso degli Alberti, a work cut of Chaucer's own period, that the Parlement should be regarded as a poetical and highly sophisticated version of the folk-tale. But the curious and interesting features of The Contending Lovers will support a self-sufficient study in folk-lore, and such a study is primarily the aim of the following pages. The Parlement will occasionally be admitted to the discussion, especially in conclusion, since relationship to Chaucer necessarily gives the folk-tale itself an enhanced interest, but only casual arguments will be made for this relationship. The material, now studied in detail, is meant to form its own argument.

L'épisode final de la Tentation de Saint Antoine, dans la version définitive, est celui des monstres.

L'ermite voudrait pénétrer le secret de la substance; il souhaite de voir les archétypes d'où dérive l'infinie variété des corps. Il se souvient vaguement de ces “formes d'esprits” naguère entrevues dans le ciel; et il songe que “ceux qui traversent le désert rencontrent des animaux dépassant toute conception.”

Simple structural analysis applied to passages cited from the works of André Breton elucidates the reasons for his condemnation of the statement La marquise sortit à cinq heures (see his Manifeste du surréalisme, 1924) as non-poetic. This study demonstrates the opposition existing between the above-mentioned realist sentence, essentially non-subjective (third-person subject), non-actual (past tense predicate), contextual (context can be supposed), and prosaic (lack of imagery), and on the other hand a theoretic surrealist sentence, essentially subjective (first-person subject), actual (present tense predicate), and non-contextual, producing a shock-image. In reality, Breton's surrealistic phrase does not always contain all of these qualities at once. However, in contrast to the condemned phrase which contains none at all, it does always manifest at least one of these characteristics, the most important having reference to the evocative power of the shock-image. A final comparison with a sentence quoted from Robbe-Grillet, the theoretician of the “nouveau roman”, proves that even though it may appear objective, the surrealist phrase is really not so. In conclusion, the four characteristics of the ideal surrealist sentence—subjectivity, actuality, non-contextuality, and ability to produce shock-images—create a poetics of discontinuity opposed to the classical art of narration as found traditionally in the novel. (In French)

Secularism is said to support cultural imperialism by propagating the colonizer's religion in nonreligious guise or by touting a nonreligious worldview that attracts native intellectuals already disenchanted with local tradition. I take a different view. Reading Muḥammad al-Sibāʿī's Arabic translation of Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), published in Egypt in 1911, I argue that secularism attracts the colonized less by presenting itself as an alternative order—religious or not—than by validating an existing religious episteme, but doing so in translation, refracting native religion through an empowered yet seemingly empowering colonial eye. Secularity infiltrates British Egypt as Islam's likeness, not antithesis. Carlyle's alluring Islamophilia moves al-Sibāʿī to prescribe English literature to Egypt against French “unbelief,” eliding the Briton's subordination of the Prophet Muḥammadto Shakespeare. Willing the native Islamic “religious” into translatability with the Western colonial “secular,” al-Sibāʿī reconstructs modern Islam as belief in the human.

One of the chief abuses urged against plays by the puritans of the sixteenth century was their immoral language. At all periods of the dispute this offence of plays was the puritans' “floodgate which let in the most, or the most substantial of all their arguments.” Writing at the beginning of the dispute, Stephen Gosson particularly denounces this corruption in English comedies cut by the Italian pattern; and following Gosson other critics of plays increased the severity of their denunciations on this account. In fact no “abuse” of plays received a more continued, severe, or unanimous denunciation than that of their immoral speeches.

The prologue to Winesburg, Ohio, in which an old writer attributes their gro-tesqueness to fanaticism, oversimplifies the characters' twisted lives, but it is hardly irrelevant or at variance with the substance of the novel. The grotesques' fanatical quest for the ideal, their unwillingness to relinquish their dreams in face of the facts of experience, is at the core of all the novel's issues—its social, sexual, and mythic content—which form a philosophical whole. Yet Anderson sympathizes with his characters, for their fanaticism derives from the depths of their being and from a valid, human desire for spiritual fulfillment. The prologue also bears vitally upon the resolution of the novel's major theme— George Willard's growth into a writer; it can be said, in fact, that the prologue brings the theme to a close. For, by the end, George has undergone a transformation of character similar to that of Dr. Reefy, whom Anderson identifies with the old writer of the prologue, and thereby comes to share the old writer's vision, which is born of the grotesque but ultimately transcends it. Indeed, symbolically at least, George is the old writer. Winesburg is his story.

Three and a half centuries of criticism confront the student of today who attacks the problem of Spenser's diction. The purpose of the following study is not so much to present new material in the field of Spenserian scholarship as to effect a synthesis of the many theories which have been put forward and thus to present the whole subject more comprehensively.

These terms all indicate a monetary unit of uncertain value and obscure origin, but Du Cange is doubtless correct in assuming that the French, Anglo-Saxon, and Latin forms are related. The earliest occurrence of mancus (or mances) in England dates from 848; the Latin mancus is found on the Continent as early as 814. The authorities are agreed that the Anglo-Saxon form came to Britain from the Continent. For me the main point of interest in this discussion is Old French mangon, best known through its first occurrence—in the Chanson de Roland:

Tenez m'espee, meillur nen at nuls horn,
Entre les helz ad plus de mil manguns.

Godefroy defines it as a “sorte de monnaie d'or: il fallait deux besantz pour faireun mangon.” This estimate of value was certainly taken from the fabliau of Guillaume au Faucon:

Dist la dame, “Or avez faucon;
Deux besans va'ent un mangon.”