It seems to me one of the most exciting and baffling characteristics of Eichendorff's art that, if I may use this paradox, his most profound insights are hidden on the surface. They travel, a strangely elusive contraband, in the full light of day, so that the last truths of his poetic vision, the whole web of his religious beliefs, his intellectual conceptions, his socio-ethical postulates transform themselves into the most deceptively simple folktunes, sung by his people with an ease and unconcern usually assigned in the secular psalter of a nation to that section which is headed “folk song, author unknown.” Goethe's solemn warning with regard to the ultimate secret and mystery of life, his injunction “Tell it no one but the sages,” was utterly lost on Eichendorff. He told it to every listening ear; and so it could happen that what in reality was an exploration and manifestation of truth, the poetic transmission of knowledge, was taken—or mistaken—as a bewitching play of lyrical mood and atmosphere. A comprehensive and integrated view of life thus turned in the public's hand into a picture book, lovely and self-contained, easy to peruse; and for the reader it was easy to absorb its sensuous refulgence without comprehending the meaning of design, color, and composition.

The nervous, obsessional Lawrence, summoning mysterious gods, blueprinting Utopian colonies with himself at their head, and assuming the Christlike task of changing the course of modern history, tends to shut out our view of the other Lawrences. He was also, somewhat unexpectedly, a writer with a highly developed flair for comic satire.

The theories and methodologies feature of this issue of PMLA contains a cluster of essays devoted to the subject of reading. At a time when many states in the United States are in the throes of a major public-education reform designed to prepare better-educated, more literate citizens for tomorrow's world, we collected these essays in the belief that scholars belonging to the MLA might be interested in reflecting on this effort in the light of their research. Hence our title, “Learning to Read,” and our appeal to our contributors to consider what they, with their scholarly expertise and pedagogical experience, might contribute to the charged debates about the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI)— debates that remind us of the high stakes involved in training good readers. We hope that PMLA readers will agree with us that the question of how the architects of the Common Core have defined the uses and measures of literacy education affects much of the MLA membership—professors, adjuncts, and graduate instructors alike.

For some years now, test results have indicated that American schoolchildren read more poorly than many of their peers abroad (Heitin). A distinctive feature of the Common Core (the shorthand title for an extraordinary effort to align educational requirements and standards nationwide) lies in its effort to devise a graduated progression in the standards for the English language arts (ELA) that is anchored in the skills of close reading. Given that the changes in teaching objectives defined and prescribed by the standards might transform the way children in America learn to make sense of the written word, it is only natural that our professional body would respond. The decisive, and some might say aggressive, manner in which the architects of the Common Core have recast the fundamentals of the ELA has provoked strong reactions, not only among K-12 teachers but also in higher education. Concerns were voiced early on in sessions at MLA conventions starting in 2013, and those conversations have continued on MLA Commons (e.g., Ferguson).

Although Middleton Murry, Swift's latest biographer, treats his subject with grateful sympathy and respect, he has, like every other writer on the problem, ignored the amazing consistency which framed Swift's relations with women. Yet the pattern need only be pointed out to be perceived, for it is recurrent, unusual (if not unique), and extraordinarily illuminating. Naturally enough, it is a pattern which originates in the author's childhood.

In the 1801 edition of Goldsmith's Miscellaneous Works were collected for the first time seven essays republished from the British Magazine (July 1761-January 1763) where they appeared under the general heading, “On the Study of the Belles Lettres.” Grouped under this title these essays have been included in all subsequent editions of Goldsmith's Works and, so far as I know, only one editor—Peter Cunningham, whose opinion will be discussed presently—has decided against their authenticity.

Among the many curious episodes in the Grail Romance, Perlesvaus, that of the Coward Knight has received comparatively little attention. It is mentioned by Birch-Hirschfeld and by Brugger and a few pages are devoted to it by Professor Nitze in his dissertation. The most recent, as well as the fullest, treatment which it has received thus far is that given to it by Miss Jessie Weston. Professor Nitze and Miss Weston make the story of the Coward Knight the basis of their argument as to the relative date of Perlesvaus and Manessier's continuation of Chrétien, since this happens to be the only episode common to these two texts. But though they deal with precisely the same evidence they arrive at opposite conclusions. The question, therefore, appears to be one which invites further discussion. Before considering their arguments, however, it will be convenient to have before us an outline of those portions of the romance which deal with the Coward Knight and his lady, the Damsel of the Car.

It is well known that D. H. Lawrence was an unsparing rewriter of his fiction, and the tradition persists that “he could never revise, he could only rewrite.” Yet, although he rewrote a number of poems, as he did his short stories and novels, he revised many more—nearly all of them, in fact, either before or after publication. His most concentrated period of activity as a poetic reviser was the winter of 1927–28, when he collected his poems for the publisher Martin Seeker, and he remarked at this time that he felt “like an autumn morning, a perfect maze of gossamer of rhythms and rhymes and loose lines floating in the air.” No wonder he felt this way, for he had been altering rhythms, rhymes, single words, and punctuation in addition to rewriting whole stanzas and sometimes whole poems. In a few weeks he altered the face of his early poems as drastically as the arch-revisers Wordsworth and Tennyson altered theirs in the course of many years.

Defoe's The Fortunate Mistress (1724) has always had less popular appeal than Moll Flanders. To what extent this unpopularity is the result of the complexities in its theme cannot easily be determined. In a significant comment on this theme Roxana declares: “The opposite Circumstances of a Wife and Whore, are such, and so many, and I have since seen the Difference with such Eyes, as I could dwell upon the Subject a great-while, but my Business is History.” In a series of interrelated episodes the history itself presents sharply contrasted matrimonial circumstances. Both the character of Defoe's realism and his social vision are illuminated by an investigation of the pertinent backgrounds. In his last great novel he explored a subject increasingly important to a society middle-class in its moral and literary values. He drew materials for the dramatization of this matrimonial theme from his varied careers as journalist, moralist, and novelist.

That Charles Reade was interested in art, along with Cremona violins, Scottish herring fisheries, and other such hobbies, has long been known. Coleman listed some of the paintings in Reade's private collection and declared him a connoisseur; Elwin pointed out that he had a genuine taste in art and was the best sort of collector; and Rives added still further information of much the same type. One of Rives' quotations is particularly interesting.

Behind nearly all English literary criticism, particularly that relating to the Neo-classic drama, lies the Poetics of Aristotle. Some writers have been greatly affected by this epochal work; others have come under its sphere of influence to a lesser degree. However, there are few authors of importance upon whom the Poetics has failed to make some profound and enduring impression. Despite the fact that its influence permeates all English literature, excessive emphasis is laid sometimes upon the effect of Aristotle's teachings, to the detriment of such prominent critics as Horace, Vida, Trissino, Giraldi, Boileau, and Fontenelle. This applies especially to commentators on Hume. Indeed, the Scottish philosopher, historian, and critic subscribed to the majority of Aristotle's tenets, but the doctrines of Tully, Horace, Boileau, and Corneille made an equally impressive and indelible imprint upon his mind.

Although recent scientific discoveries about the genetic and biochemical components of manic-depressive psychosis have radically revised our understanding of the etiology and psychodynamics of this illness, psychological studies of Virginia Woolf's life and work have generally remained tied to Freud's outmoded model of loss-induced neurosis. This model appeals to critics because it readily imposes coherence on often inconsistent biographical data, but it fails to account for psychotic breakdowns and tends to disparage Woolf with its emphasis on the infantile and evasive aspects of art. Since Woolf's symptoms do fulfill the manic-depressive paradigm, a consideration of how contemporary psychiatric theory alters our reading of her life may also explain the therapeutic value of her bold experiments in fiction as well as her profound insights into subject-object transactions and the pitfalls of interpretation in general.

This essay closely examines several mythological autos sacramentales by the seventeenth-century Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca. These eucharistic dramas, allegorizations of famous tales from antiquity, raise provocative questions about the relation of myth to allegory and about the hermeneutical problems inherent in both. By explicitly thematizing the Word as source and guarantor of pagan myth and of language and illuminated interpretation themselves, the plays embody a powerful allegory of the assumed divine origin and sacral significance not only of myth but also of an essential and radical logocentrism. For Calderón divine ordination and revealed truth implicitly sacramentalize the auto and sanction the human author's hermeneutical and creative endeavors. This study shows that Calderón's metaphysics and allegorical theory constitute a timeless witness to Christian truth and a timely challenge to some widely accepted tenets of modern literary theory.

The poetry of passenger flight, especially in the early years of the jet age, is exceptional in illuminating the perceptual, affective, and ethical confusions of the global perspective. Offering readings of James Merrill's “Flying from Byzantium,” Elizabeth Bishop's “Night City,” Amiri Baraka's “The Nation Is like Ourselves,” and Derek Walcott's “The Fortunate Traveller,” this essay integrates theoretical grounding in the phenomenology of flight (speed, distance, time, and perspective), the legacy of Romantic landscape meditation in contemporary poetry and the evolution of the literature of flight, and relevant historical background about the development of commercial air travel. The passenger's view in the period when flight was no longer thrilling and not yet tedious is a peculiarly apt trope for the difficulties of imagining the global and of registering the conundrum of globalization—in its most basic sense, time-space compression—from its repercussions in our private lives to the greatest humanitarian challenges of our time.

Persönlichkeiten der Geschichte mit einander zu vergleichen, könnte als ein schon methodologisch verfehltes Unterfangen bezeichnet werden, da ja jede geschichtliche Erscheinung als Individuum ein Einmaliges und Besonderes darstellt. Und doch schließt der Begriff Individuum Verwandtschaft oder Gleichgerichtetheit in Wesentlichem und Unwesentlichem nicht aus. Eine Vergleichung kann daher als gegenseitige Aufhellung oder auch Beleuchtung des einem aus dem andern neue Gesichtspunkte der Charakteristik aufzeigen, vorausgesetzt, daß zur Vergleichung ein gemeinsamer psychologischer oder geistiger Grund und Boden vorhanden ist. In diesem Sinne mag der nachfolgende Versuch aufgefaßt werden. Wenn dabei in unserer Fragestellung der Name Keller dem Goethes vorangeht, so wird damit natürlich nicht eine Wertordnung ausgedrückt, sondern eine Messung des späteren Dichters an dem sozusagen absoluten Maßstab des früheren.

The problem we are proposing to discuss is the result of a peculiar carelessness of Montaigne in his chapter on Friendship in his Essais, Book I, 28. He begins by noting that a painter,1 commissioned by him to decorate some of the large panels of his study with pictures, daubs fanciful designs, “crotesques”, around the central pieces. So, remarks Montaigne, his thoughts here are mere figures without any other purpose than to enshrine a great piece composed by his friend, Etienne de la Boétie. This gem is a little essay called by its author Discours de la servitude volontaire, but soon renamed Le contr'un by those who read it. Montaigne then relates that it was written by La Boétie in his early youth (later specified as eighteen) and circulated among appreciative readers who relished its spirited defence of liberty against tyrants. Hence the name of Contr'un. Montaigne insists that it is beautifully composed and if its author had lived and undertaken a long work of reflection, he would have created something memorable that would have made him comparable to authors of antiquity. But this Discours and a Commentary on the Edict of January2 are all he has available now, since he has already published all the other MSS left him by his friend's bequest.3 Montaigne admits that he has a special fondness for the Contr'un because it furnished the means of their first awareness of each other even before they met, thus opening the door to the perfect friendship between them. This relationship was so extraordinary that its like will not be seen more than once in three centuries.

From the time of the miracle cycles and the morality plays songs have been used for the embellishment of English tragedy. As the drama developed, lyrics in plays came to have functional as well as decorative or merely divertive significance, until with Shakespeare their dramatic values acquired subtlety, and songs became an integral part of the technique of comedy and tragedy. The rôle of song in the plays of Shakespeare's predecessors and contemporaries to 1642, and especially in those of Shakespeare himself, has been analyzed with great detail, but there has been no account of the projection of songs into the drama of the Restoration, when with neo-classic emphasis on regularity and a body of tragedies essentially classical in form, one might expect altered usage of previously established conventions or even an astringent use of song itself.

The four invocations to the Muse in Paradise Lost signal the stages of a compositional process coordinating the levels of the poem's inspiration and overall design. Using in downward sequence the four inspirational “furors” Neoplatonism derived from Plato's Phaedrus, Milton calibrated each narrative stage of his work to the thematic range governing that inspirational level, while the entire progression of the poem expresses the structural significance of this scalar paradigm. Such techniques were used by Dante and others and by Milton himself in Lycidas. But in Paradise Lost the inspirational pattern, as the spatial axis governing the poem's descending and ascending movements, combines with the narrative movements of the poem's temporal axis to shape a particular form that Milton considered essential to every art dedicated to the highest good and final end implicit in the divine scheme. It is this “universal form” that both metaphysically and structurally underlies Paradise Lost.

The “Ode to the West Wind” has received considerable special comment from a number of students of Shelley. H. B. Forman has indicated, in part, its emotional background; Professor H. C. Pancoast has discussed it in relation to the scene and climate in which it was written; W. E. Peck has pointed out parallels of its thought and imagery in Shelley's earlier work; and Professor B. P. Kurtz has recently shown in an admirable study the relation of its theme of life and death and regeneration to the poet's “pursuit of death” throughout his work. There is wanting, however, a detailed account of the sources, the development, and the significance of the poem's central symbols, the Wind and the Leaves, and of the intellectual and emotional disturbances, associated for Shelley with the symbols, which may have been the direct causes of his writing the “Ode.” This study attempts such an account.