To distinguish between the course of rhetorical ideas, and the growth of style on the one hand, and of systematic rhetoric on the other, is perhaps to endeavor after too nice a distinction. Yet when we read sixteenth-century English, we may see, between the general effort to use prose with effect and the rather arid sequence of treatises on formal rhetoric, certain definite ideas on prose expression, certain views as to the best vocabulary, certain views on sentence-structure or figures of speech. The frank, vigorous prose of Latimer has style of a sort, the slight treatise of Cox has system. Neither the one thing nor the other is the opinion pro and con as to inkhorn words, for example. The following paper notes in the direction of the vocabulary only, a conscious effort to determine some fundamental principles which should obtain in the use of English as a means of literary expression.

When I was young, it seemed that most Americans had never heard of Burma. Since communication with Burma was constrained, I was curious about its culture, which my family carried so near to their hearts. My first memory of seeing “Burma” involved watching The King and I (1956) on television. I was captivated by Rita Moreno playing Tuptim, a Burmese girl who is given to the king of Siam by the prince of Burma and is secretly having an affair with her escort. The new British governess gives Tuptim Uncle Tom's Cabin to improve her English. The Burmese concubine articulates her frustration by staging an adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel for the king and some European visitors. During the performance, Tuptim attempts an escape with her Burmese lover.

Readers have long acknowledged John Donne's lament for the decay of the world in the two Anniversarie poems commemorating Elizabeth Drury. What has not been acknowledged is the extent to which the second of these poems stages the reluctance of the soul to depart from the carcass of the earth so vividly depicted in the first. In The Second Anniversarie, Donne does something unprecedented in early modern literature: he gives voice to a soul that cannot bear to leave its earthly body behind. This essay argues that Donne represents a mutual longing between soul and body that stands in marked contrast to conventional Protestant depictions of the relationship between the two parts of the self. His explanation for such mutual longing, I contend, derives from his belief in the corporeal origins of the soul. (RT)

In 1935 the Dutch scholar Johannes B. Tielrooy argued that Arthur Rimbaud's prose poem “Mystique” (c. 1872) was an ekphrasis, or literary description, of the central panel of Hubert and Jan van Eyck's altarpiece Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (1432). Although this hypothesis was deemed credible for a number of years, it is now thought to be unlikely that the painting inspired the poem or that the poem is an instance of ekphrasis. However, Tielrooy's ekphrastic interpretation can still be used to reveal elements of the poem otherwise hidden to the reader. I demonstrate the potential of Tielrooy's speculative practice, what I call mystical ekphrasis, by juxtaposing Rimbaud's poem with a chromolithographic representation of one of Jean Fouquet's illuminations, with which the poem also has possible but not conclusive links.

This bibliographical essay brings together for the first time all evaluations of Housman's poetry and poetic-theory 1920-1945. It effects a twofold end: (1) historical—a survey of Housman estimates by scholar-critics and by poet-critics; (2) critical—a survey of all critical ideas and problems of contemporary criticism as focussed upon a poet of the preceding age.

Romance, so modern criticism proclaims, is in no wise incompatible with the temper of the heroic epic. As in tragedy moments of poignant emotion are at once heightened and relieved by the introduction of comedy, so in epic a classic clearness of outline and tranquillity of mood are rendered doubly effective when contrasted with the mystery and magic of romance. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the second adventure of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, in which the hero does battle with a supernatural monster far away from the haunts of men. The scene shifts suddenly from the realistic setting at the Danish court, and the very air grows heavy with baleful suggestion,—just as when the lights and feasting of the Wartburg are left behind and the mountain in which Venus holds her revels looms up at twilight. “That,” says the Anglo-Saxon poet, “is an uncanny place.” The situation grows tense with a new horror, not felt even in the earlier scene when the demon Grendel, creeping through the mists of evening, invades once too often the hall of the Danes. The element of strangeness is added to beauty, with marvellous effect.

For Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, the word home is itself both “familiar” and “foreign,” a paradox that confronts him with questions of both political and linguistic identity. Stephen's solution is to idealize the notions of exile and exteriority, but Joyce recognizes that this attempt to domesticate the experience of cultural alienation is a project wed to figurative language and one that may well end up reinscribing the very oppositions it intends to bring under its control. Nowhere is this dilemma more clear or more urgent than in the “Nestor” episode of Ulysses, Joyce's most fully articulated confrontation between interiority and exteriority, patriotism and exile. What makes the confrontation truly dialectical is not simply the figurative reconciliation or balancing of Manichean oppositions but rather the referral of the conflict to a historically occluded political subtext, whose very enigma points forward to tensions as yet untranscended in our own contemporary culture.

In the course of preparing an edition, with the kind permission of the Coleridge family, of the unpublished correspondence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I have found, among the several hundred letters examined, five written by Coleridge to Lord Byron which afford a fuller view of the relationship between the two poets. The contact between Coleridge and Byron was brief, their correspondence being confined to the period between Easter 1815 and April 1816, the time at which Byron finally departed from England. It is known that in 1812 Byron interceded with the managers of Drury Lane for the production of Coleridge's Remorse and that he attended at least two of Coleridge's lectures in 1811 and 1812; but their personal intercourse apparently did not extend beyond those incidents and the exchange of a few letters. Most of Byron's letters to Coleridge have already been published, but the five letters which Coleridge wrote to Byron have never been published in full.

The presentation of the banquet temptation in Paradise Regained unfolds a complex system of allusions that allows us, first, to ascertain the place of male sexual difference in Milton's canon and, second, to reassess how we interpret Milton's genders and their relation to the sexual epistemology of the later Renaissance. The sylvan setting invokes a tradition of increasing specification of homoeroticism in Renaissance receptions of classical pastoral, and the presence of Ganymede and Hylas recalls vernacular idioms of sodomy and sexual transgression. These associations place male sexual difference within the Miltonic canon in a way that has seldom been recognized, but a further survey of exegetical manipulations of homoeroticism demonstrates that Milton's use of this motif serves the larger project of rewriting “common glosses.”

With no immediate source of Chaucer's Prioress' Tale yet brought to light, postulations about the nature of this source, such as may be tentatively formulated from a study of the thirty-two available analogues of the miracle, have been made in order to estimate the extent and artistry of Chaucer's contribution to this tale of the little clergeon. Carleton Brown in his admirable studies published in 1910 and 1941 traced the development of the legend from what he considered the most primitive stage through Chaucer's story and the analogues which resemble it most closely. For this purpose Brown divided the thirty-three versions into three groups, A, B, and C, each of which represents a distinct form of the miracle and a distinct pattern of events.

No wonder students of Middle English literature are concentrating on systems of exegesis, symbolism, spiritual and liturgical exercise. These traditional lores convey ideas, and it is the ideas in medieval poetic works that often seem most valuable. Everywhere abound explicit propositions and exhortations: society is corrupt, man is fate's victim, bend your will to God's. Implicit notions about destiny, justice, and will seem to move behind veils of narrative and description, even to stir within the verbal devices adorning these veils. When routed out of poetic works, such ideas seem fully comprehensible; in fact, they do not differ essentially from those to be found in works of theology, philosophy, and homily, and they seem shaped by the same tools of rhetoric and dialectic. No wonder people are more intrigued by these pearls than by the oysters in which they live.

The eighteenth century is the century of parody. Its critical attitude of mind accorded with the ungenerous and censorious irreverence of these farces. The wise and witty petit-maître was entirely too frigid and too supercilious not to sneer at the sublime attitudes of tragic stage-heroes, at the tearful Men of Feeling of budding Romanticism, at the dry seriousness of the savant or the metrical enthusiasm of the poet. Moreover, as the number of literates increased and furnished a steadily growing group of readers and theater-goers, the number of the æsthetically obtuse who came into contact with books or the stage, increased proportionally. And, in all times, they form the predestined public of the parodist. Unimaginative and pedestrian, gifted with a sturdy sense of reality, they are not easily beguiled by the illusions created in us by a work of art; they steadily perceive the abyss that gapes between Dream and Fact. From these two groups, the half-lettered bourgeois and the shallow fops, the parodist recruited the main body of his followers: he catered to the æsthetically mediocre. His public was large. As long as he kept his burlesques within the bounds of a rough and ready buffoonery, analogous to the modern Revue de fin d'année or to slap-stick comedy, he could count upon success.

Since its initial vogue during the lifetime of Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece has received short shrift from the general public and little more attention from critics and scholars. This relative neglect has done much to obscure the actual importance of the poem; for, quite apart from its intrinsic merits as poetry, The Rape of Lucrece constitutes one of the most explicit and illuminating documents which bear upon Shakespeare's development, and especially upon his coming of age as an artist. Written almost certainly during the year immediately preceding its registration on 9 May 1594, and hence in the interval between Shakespeare's apprentice experiments in the theater and his mature dramatic achievements with the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the poem provides unique information about Shakespeare at a crucial point in his career. Frankly advertised, moreover, as a serious poem on a serious theme, it bears every evidence of having been undertaken by its author as a premeditated and highly self-conscious bid for recognition as a serious literary artist. Indeed, in the deliberate thoughtfulness of its conception and the conscientious care of its execution The Rape of Lucrece is one of the most laborious and studied works of art that Shakespeare ever produced. And as such, it affords a revealing index to the kind of thinking imposed on its creator at the time, and by the process, of its creation.

German romanticism extends over a relatively long period, since in part it goes back to the ideas of Herder and the Storm and Stress movement in the seventies of the eighteenth century. Within narrower limits, one may assign to it the period from the seventeen-nineties to about 1830, when it was challenged by the Young German Movement. Obviously, however, this does not mark the end of its influence. To give a brief account of so complex and varied a movement, and to attempt to generalize in the face of marked individual differences is an undertaking beset with pitfalls.

Bernhard Suphan selber hat einmal bemerkt, dass “Herder in Luthers Schriften bewandert war wie wenige” Menschen des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts und dass “keiner von den klassischen Zeitgenossen die Grösse des Reformators in so vollen Tönen und zu alien Zeiten gerühmt hat wie er.” Dies wichtige Gesamturteil, dem auch Rudolf Haym nicht widerspricht, weist auf den beträchtlichen Umfang der herderschen Lutherkenntnisse wie auch auf den hohen Grad seiner Lutheranerken-nung hin, insofern manche andere Deutsche der Herderzeit, vor allem Hamann und Lessing, ebenfalls über ein beachtliches Lutherwissen verfügten und den Reformater gehörig lobten. Ist Klopstocks Lutherinteresse vorwiegend sprachlich-künstlerisch, Goethes und Schillers trotz mancher Feinheit und Prägnanz doch mehr peripherisch als zentral, so ist die Lutherkenntnis Hamanns, Herders und Lessings erheblich umfassender. Bei allem Gemeinsamen nun in dem Lutherbilde der drei Letztgenannten bestehen aber auch zwischen ihnen wesentliche Unterschiede in ihrer Stellung zu Luther, Unterschiede, die sich bis in den Kern ihrer verschiedenen Persönlichkeiten erstrecken. In Herders Verhältnis zu Luther lassen sich im allgemeinen drei Hauptepochen unterscheiden, die Rigaer, die Bückeburger und die Weimarer, von denen die letzte wegen ihrer Länge wie auch wegen ihrer Reichhaltigkeit in zwei Unterteile zerfällt, die Jahrzehnte von 1776 bis 1786 und, nach einem mehr als fünfjährigen Schweigen über Luther, von 1792 bis zu Herders Tod. Innerhalb dieser einzelnen Epochen jedoch wird die Darstellung nicht streng chronologisch verfahren, sondern, ohne Ansprüche auf Vollständigkeit bei der Masse des Materials, nur das Wesentliche mehr systematisch als historisch vorzulegen sich bemühen. Allein Hauptgesichtspunkte und Hauptentwicklungslinien können im Rahmen dieses Aufsatzes berücksichtigt werden.