Longfellow's Sonnet, “The Cross of Snow,” written eighteen years after his wife's death and left among his papers, has survived to become one of his most admired productions. Samuel Longfellow, the poet's brother and biographer, first brought it to the world's attention, publishing it in the second volume of the biography. Along with the poem, he added some biographical details which to this day usually serve in paraphrased form as a preface to anthologized appearances of the poem. Writing of Longfellow's grief-stricken anguish during the months following Mrs. Longfellow's death, his brother observed:

In one of his early letters Mr. Longfellow had said: ‘With me all deep feelings are silent ones.’ It was so of the deepest. No word of his bitter sorrow and anguish found expression in verse. But he felt the need of some continuous and tranquil occupation for his thoughts; and after some months he summoned the resolution to take up again the task of translating Dante,—begun, it may be remembered, years before, and long laid aside. For a time he translated a canto each day. . . . Eighteen years afterward, looking over, one day, an illustrated book of Western scenery, his attention was arrested by a picture of that mysterious mountain upon whose lonely, lofty breast the snow lies in long furrows that make a rude but wonderfully clear image of a vast cross. At night as he looked upon the pictured countenance that hung upon his chamber wall, his thoughts framed themselves into the verses that follow. He put them away in his portfolio, where they were found after his death.

In October 1992, the united nations security council requested the secretary-general to appoint an impartial commission to examine and record the atrocities committed in the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Two years later, this commission produced its final report. Some of the goriest pages in this catalogue of infamy are dedicated to the explosion on the Markale open-air market in central Sarajevo that took place around noon on Saturday, 5 February 1994. The report describes it as “the worst attack on civilians during the siege” of Sarajevo, citing that it killed at least 66 persons and wounded 197 (781). This explosion can be said to represent the turning point in the Bosnian war, which by that point had lasted some twenty-two months without any reasonable resolution in sight. David Binder, a New York Times reporter and the author of the most detailed account of this atrocity to date, writes that it

Many of the remarkable qualities of the Jeu d' Adam have long been recognized and warmly admired: the subtlety of its characterization and motivation, the vivacity and freshness of its dialogue, the skill with which its verse forms have been handled. Yet its author has never been given sufficient credit, it would seem, for the originality of his composition. Here is a play still attached to the church, through its use of the church itself and of church properties, through its incorporaton of liturgical lectiones and responsoria, and through its adaptation and translation of a liturgical Ordo Prophetarum; nevertheless its author has dramatized and visualized for himself, with more spirit and imagination than any of his successors (he had no known predecessors), the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. Surely a man capable of such creative and untrammelled writing needed few “sources” and may be presumed, when proof to the contrary is lacking, to have drawn largely upon his own inspiration.

The Drinking Academy, A Play by Thomas Randolph, edited by Dr. Samuel A. Tannenbaum and me and published by the Harvard University Press in June, 1930, was noticed at length in The Review of English Studies for October by Professor G. C. Moore Smith. He rejects Randolph's authorship and advances the claim of Robert Baron. “The present writer expressed the view,” he asserts, “that if the manuscript was, as alleged, in the handwriting of its author, the play could hardly be Randolph's.” As I was emboldened to accept Dr. Day's ascription of the play to Randolph partly by the fact that Professor Moore Smith, convinced by Dr. Day's evidence, had himself categorically assigned it to Randolph in the very note to which he thus vaguely refers, I subjoin extracts therefrom, since—as the testimony of an expert—they are an important element in the case.

Of all the commonplace antitheses of literary history none seems more solidly justified than that which opposes Descartes to Pascal. Critics, depending upon their prejudices, have taken sides with either Pascal or Descartes, with either religion or reason. Pascal, whose total view seems more comprehensive, has received the lion's share of favorable comment. To many, his wider awareness, allowing for reason and more-than-reason, makes Descartes appear insufficient and incomplete. The little religion in Descartes is seen chiefly as an excrescence, or a strategic back-tracking: Descartes, seeing the dangerous implications of his rationalism, attempts the always unhappy marriage of Faith and Reason, one he regards as at best a mariage de convenance. Pascal, on the other hand, with his divorce of Faith and Reason, is on “le véritable chemin.” In short, Descartes pays the lip-service to Religion which Pascal pays to Reason.

World Literature is a Notoriously Ambiguous Term. Since Goethe Began Referring to a Universal Weltliteratur IN 1827, the meaning of world literature has passed through many mutations, and, with the resurgence of interest in the term that followed David Damrosch's publication in 2003 of his provocative What Is World Literature?, it has generated a good deal of controversy. Although it appears to describe a type of literature or group of texts, world literature is more often used to designate a critical perspective. World literature is not so much a canon of works conceived to be globally or universally significant as an approach to literary criticism. What this critical approach entails, however, is often unclear and frequently freighted with cultural and sociopolitical assumptions that challenge the supposed openness of world literature. Most theorists agree that the notion of world literature invites exploration of the ways in which texts exceed national borders, but the relative status of national and international sociocultural frameworks remains highly contentious, as do critics' understandings of a text's “worldliness” and mode of circulation. As Franco Moretti famously asserts, world literature is “not an object, it's a problem”; it requires ongoing debate.

Much of the richness, as well as the fascination, of Rimbaud's art is due to the incongruities with which it is studded. These incongruities indicate a boyish sense of humor noticeable even in his treatment of serious subjects, imparting to them a certain cocasserie—a tough and sardonic humor indeed for a boy, but still a distinctive quality, savored by many. Like Hamlet, Arthur Rimbaud was given to madness, half feigned, half tragically-true, and his peevish jokes are of the same kind as those of that other embittered youth. These surprises also serve to color his descriptive poems, in verse and in prose, and in fact they may be thought to arise necessarily in the poetic process consciously cultivated by Rimbaud the voyant, who was not afraid to force his senses out of focus as a means of gaining access to the paradise of pure truth.

For well nigh a century and three-quarters the authorship of The Taming of the Shrew has been a Shaksperian problem; Warburton was apparently the first to question that it was the work of a single author. According to him The Shrew represents the work of Shakspere to the extent “that he has, here and there, corrected the dialogue, and now and then added a Scene.” This view was held by Steevens, who believed, however, that Shakspere's hand was visible in almost every scene, particularly in those scenes between tamer and shrew. In 1857 Grant White proposed the theory of dual composition: a collaborator supplied the love element of the underplot, whereas to Shakspere belonged “the strong, clear characterization, the delicious humor, and the rich verbal coloring of the recast Induction, and all the scenes in which Katharine and Petruchio and Grumio are the prominent figures, together with the general effect produced by scattering lines and words and phrases here and there, and removing others elsewhere throughout the rest of the play.” In general, White's theory has prevailed down to the present day; it was supported by that industrious student, Fleay, and Professor A. H. Tolman. On the other hand, not a few writers, on aesthetic or general grounds, have voiced the opinion that Shakspere worked unaided: notable among these is Miss Charlotte Porter. It is the purpose of the present study, by undertaking a more systematic investigation, to show that Shakspere is responsible for the entire play.

In 1963 J. N. Hook, the first Coordinator for Project English in the United States Office of Education, reviewed briefly the growth and current status of Project English for the profession (“Project English: The First Year,” PMLA, lxxviii, September 1963, Part 2, 33–36). In 1964 Erwin R. Steinberg, the second Coordinator, reported at length to the profession on the history and prospects for research in English funded by the Office of Education (“Research on the Teaching of English Under Project English,” PMLA, lxxix, September 1964, Part 2, 50–76). He incorporated into his account summaries of the current status of each Curriculum Study Center, prepared by the Directors of the Centers themselves.

As their schools reopen this year after the summer vacation, about 7,000,000 Japanese children from 12 to 18 years old are spending five hours a week studying English. They are taught by some 85,000 teachers, few of whom have ever heard the language spoken by a native—except, perhaps, over the radio. In the universities hundreds of thousands more are busy with their seventh, eighth, ninth, or tenth year of English. In large cities tens of thousands of clerks and secretaries, waitresses and salesgirls, bankers and government employees of all ages go several evenings a week to commercial schools to learn English conversation and business correspondence. Many of these are among several hundred thousand listeners to radio English courses. At newsstands and bookstores, on streetcars and buses, electric trains and subways, thousands more are poring over magazines with English articles, movie scenarios and jokes; over grammar books whose chapter headings, such as “Elliptical Negation” and “Concessive Clause,” suggest their contents; over cram books, word lists and sample examinations. For high schools follow the lead of universities in making English grammar and translation a part of the rigorous ordeal called shiken jigoku, or “examination hell,” a stiffly competitive process of admission. And ever more business firms are requiring job applicants to take English tests.

“Cain's jaw-bone, that did the first murther!” Is there anything more in this phrase than meets the casual eye? Though the skull and jaw-bone of Hamlet's brooding comment are without doubt human, it has been suggested by no less an authority than the late Professor Skeat that here is an allusion to an old tradition according to which Cain killed Abel with the jaw-bone of an ass. The suggestion might seem almost fantastic were it not for several corroborative circumstances: namely, that the tradition was English; that it was wide-spread and familiar; that it found a place in the mystery plays; and that Shakspere was not unaccustomed to making allusions to the primitive and cruder art of the religious drama.

For an admirer of Coleridge's literary criticism it is most unsettling and mortifying to observe that the scholars who have questioned his reputation, though they have been in the minority, are among the most distinguished students of literature in our time. Sometimes, it is true, this distinction has come in Wordsworth studies, which often produce not only the inevitable study of Wordsworth's friendly association with Coleridge but also an unconsciously partisan defence of Wordsworth against the criticism in Biographia Literaria. In other cases one assumes that these doubters of Coleridge's fame have been annoyed by the uncritical and sanctimonious chorus in his praise, and wish to work back toward a more balanced judgment. Yet when Mr. Lucas—to take the most explicit and severe critic for a first instance—ridicules a few selected absurdities of Coleridge without acknowledging his profundities, one does not get the impression of balanced literary criticism but of urbane and deadly satire. Such absurdities as he quotes are numerous enough in Coleridge, no doubt; one might even agree that many of them are not exceptional, but characteristic. But we do not judge Shakespeare by Titus Andronicus or Wordsworth by The Excursion or Keats by Endymion. Even if we consider the whole mind of a great man as the background of his genius, we judge him ultimately only by the genius itself, which can never be more than part of his mind. Surely this is more necessary with Coleridge than with almost any other writer whom one could name, for his ill-health, unhappiness, and slavery to opium, and the instability of his temperament, all clouded his genius so much that it is easier to see the clouds than the light. Students who have collected fragments never intended for publication have given only too ample a field of choice for those who wish to illustrate the dullness or the nonsense of Coleridge's prose, but these students have presumably worked for other students, who wish material for complete historical information. As a finished and sensitive historical student of English and classical literature, Mr. Lucas is surely as fully qualified to select for praise as for blame, though he limits himself to the latter. The illustrations which he so deftly and plausibly presents of “the art of sinking” in criticism might well be matched by similar bits from the poetry, which Mr. Lucas, like Mr. Garrod, praises at the expense of Coleridge's criticism. Yet neither he, nor any one else, has ever offered the poorer poems as a proof that The Ancient Mariner has no excellence.

That numerous commentators on Paradise Lost have been repelled by the presentation of the Father in Book III is common knowledge. The objections raised have been voiced variously, ranging from Mark Van Doren's flat statement that Milton's God is a “dull dictator” to G. Wilson Knight's persuasion that sulphur is more appropriate to the poet's Heaven than ambrosia. Behind these and similar statements stands the opinion that Milton's defense of the ways of God to man is, as Sir Herbert Grierson put it, “too purely legal.”.

In one of his most stimulating discussions Ortega y Gasset declares that the function of the critic is neither to defend nor to attack, but to understand. In this sense the critic, he says, actually interprets and completes the work of the author so that the public can better understand him.

This study is of the position of Thomas Dekker in a literary genre, prison literature, which comprises descriptions in prose works, poems, and plays, of one or more of London's fourteen prisons. The study seeks to establish the canon, chronology, and significance of Dekker's contributions to this literature, and, at the same time, it undertakes to overcome the absence, in literary and social history, of an examination of penal writings published during the reign of James I of England. The genre first flourished in the Jacobean period, and Thomas Dekker was its earliest principal writer. He wrote or collaborated upon about half of the entire output of Jacobean prison works; he composed all of his prison writings, with the possible exception of one, throughout the course of more than twenty years; and he cast the material into the four literary types of which this genre is composed: rogue exposures, dramatic settings, reformatory essays, and “characters.”

One of the most important literary manifestations of that direct interest in the Near East which travellers and travel books created, appears in English prose fiction of the early nineteenth century. The prose fiction thus supplements the Near East poetry of Byron, Moore, Southey, and numerous minor versifiers as well as the travel books themselves, which may be considered a kind of minor literature. Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century English readers had shown considerable interest in the Near East, particularly in the oriental tale; yet this interest was almost wholly indirect—the product of French accounts or French translations of the Arabian Nights. It was not until the last quarter of the century that new developments brought “the Orient much nearer to England than ever before … In letters, this modern spirit was first expressed by the increased number of travelers' accounts.”

The nearer the knights of Arthur's Court approach the Grail, the more illusive and intangible the holy vessel appears. In Sir Percivale's own words:

“Lo, if I find the Holy Grail itself
And touch it, it will crumble into dust.“

Thus one might say the Grail symbolizes in its evasiveness the problem of its own origin. For if its source is still to be sought, this is largely because the problem involved so easily eludes one's grasp. The difficulty is to fix the eye on the main issue, to the exclusion of secondary considerations. The Grail stories have been classed as Perceval and Galaad forms, as those in which a quest is the burden of the tale, as those in which it is the history of the sacred vessel itself.

The English poem Widsith (composed in the 7th century) contains two passages (v. 116 and v. 119 ff.) that refer to stories known to us also from the Icelandic Hervararsaga. The present paper is primarily an attempt to determine the form and relationship of these stories as the Widsith poet knew them. Any such attempt, however, necessarily involves an examination of the Hervararsaga. This saga has been much studied, but never investigated with the Widsith primarily in mind. Even R. W. Chambers, in his monumental edition of Widsith, relegates to a few footnotes his comments on the relation of the English poem to the Icelandic saga. That there is much to be said, the length of the present paper will suffice to demonstrate! It is my hope, moreover, that my discussion will serve likewise to clear up some of the obscurities of the saga.