EZRA POUND himself emphasizes somewhat his work on the element of meter.1 T. S. Eliot wrote of Pound's importance in prosody to younger poets that “there is no one else to study.”2 Yet of all the critical attention which Pound's poetry has received in recent years, not one piece analyzes this fundamental aspect of his work.3 We have almost uniquely Pound's critical pronouncements and the verse iteself to lead us to an understanding.

William Bradford's tableau of the Pilgrims' landing at Cape Cod supplies a conventional point of departure for American literature. Yet, in the customary ordering of literary history, the passage is doubly anomalous. Written in 1630, it presents, at least one hundred years too soon, an example of what Kant later called the dynamical sublime; and it anticipates, some two hundred years too soon, episodes from the canon of nineteenth-century American literature that criticism describes as characteristically American. The essay considers the formal motives and rhetorical coercions behind this double anomaly to show how the sublime, as it emerges in Bradford, signals a withdrawal from empirical fact in a search for satisfactions of meaning that derive from literature. The level of aggression Bradford finds necessary to this withdrawal lends his writing a recognizably American bent. The passage shows us a scene of writing at once singular to Bradford and distinctly American.

It has been made increasingly evident by critics in recent years that the drowning of Edward King was the occasion, rather than the subject, of Lycidas. Milton's concern was generally with the life, death, and resurrection of the dedicated poet, and specifically with his own situation at the time. From this premise it follows that there are no digressions in the poem and that the form and traditions of pastoral elegy are entirely appropriate to its intentions.

The dates assigned to Milton's two sonnets on his blindness have depended upon our dating of the time when blindness became “total.” It is the purpose of this essay to qualify this premise, to propose revision of all the dates now usually accepted, and, not incidentally, to urge a possibly new interpretation of a passage in one of the sonnets.

It has long been known that Chaucer translated portions of Pope Innocent III's De Miseria Humane Conditionis for use in the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale, but his artistic reasons for doing so have never been determined. If the translated passages from the De Miseria were short and all in one place, there might be no compelling reason to search for an artistic purpose: Chaucer may simply have wanted to insert a passage from a work that he was translating at the time out of his love for authorities—a love shared by almost all medieval writers. But the facts are that Chaucer made more extensive use of the De Miseria in the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale (nearly fifty lines) than anywhere else in his works, that the translated passages are from five different chapters and two different books in the De Miseria, and that they are scattered in five places throughout the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale. It is therefore highly likely that Chaucer added the passages from the De Miseria for particular artistic reasons, and it is the purpose of this paper to determine what those reasons were.

The notebook, which disappeared from the Library of Congress sometime after its first, incomplete publication in 1921, has been described and analyzed from an imperfect microfilm copy. The new information discloses that, although the notebook was used until 1854–55, the traditional date of 1847 for most of the contents is correct. Although the notebook is close to the 1855 Leaves of Grass in its poetical material, it shows relatively little influence from specific events, politics, or literary ideas in Whitman's formative period.

It is often forgotten that the humanities—which are made up of history, philosophy, literary studies, philology, rhetoric, art history, musicology, and linguistics—are characterized not so much by their objects of study, which can change over time, as by their focus on reading, the reading of verbal texts, primarily, but also reading in the sense of decoding and recoding images, sounds, and movements. The disciplines that compose the humanities teach different kinds of reading practices. The products of these disciplines for the most part belong to the class of prose and poetic discourses. This is why they may often look similar or even the same, especially when they are cast in the same mode: narrative, argumentative, descriptive, or expressive as the case may be.

Professor Manly, in his British Academy lecture, Chaucer and the Rhetoricians, has shown with his usual brilliance that certain features of Chaucer's technique resulted from his study of manuals on the art of writing. As yet, however, little attention has been given to such handbooks as possible sources for the matter of passages in Chaucer. For instance, no one, I think, has suggested that rhetorical treatises may have supplied Chaucer with quotations from Latin writers; yet the rhetorics are as likely sources as the grammars and florilegia, which have long been mentioned in this connection. Indeed, two of the three arts of poetry with which Professor Manly's lecture is most concerned, the Ars Versificatoria of Matthieu de Vendôme and the Documentum de Arte Versificandi of Geoffrey de Vinsauf, contain numerous citations from Horace and Juvenal, as well as from those Latin poets to whom the Troilus is commanded to pay especial homage, “Virgile, Ovyde, … Lucan, and Stace.”

My chief business in this article is to study the characteristic details in Otherworld descriptions, to see how widely they are used, and to discover any constant traditions in the use. A great deal of work, already done in this field, has made the material accessible; and since my paper is only by way of being a preliminary sketch, I shall frequently use the summaries offered by previous scholars in the case of particular documents. In general, the material with which I shall work is very well known and scarcely subject to any dispute.

Although it has long been recognized that there is a certain political-historical content to Prometheus Unbound, there has, so far, been no attempt to make a consistent interpretation of it in terms of this content. It is the object of this paper to attempt to remedy this defect. In so doing I shall present only interpretations which can be supported by reference to Shelley's other works, in many of which the same basic ideas are present though, fortunately, minus their symbolic garb.

The exact dates for the majority of the writings of John Lydgate have not been ascertained. Occasionally Lydgate tells specifically when he composed a poem by inserting into it a statement concerning the time of composition which makes the dating somewhat obvious; other poems have been dated according to style and versification, age of manuscripts, and topical allusions to historical events. The present paper discusses the dating of four of Lydgate's works—Temple of Glas, Troy Book, Siege of Thebes, and The Title and Pedigree of Henry VI—by means of the astronomical allusions in these poems.

In the studies devoted to the literary growth of Novalis the roots that lower into the realm of Shakespearean art and thought have strangely been overlooked. Such omission is not entirely unwarranted in view of the seeming disparity in substance and character between the works of the two poets. And yet the assumption that Novalis should have remained impervious to the “fine frenzy” of Shakespeare, when all of his friends and literary companions came under the spell of it, must give us pause. Literary “influences” do not always proceed along the path of material evidence; they are forces that often come to light in forms and directions which we least expect. A poet as sensitive and unpredictable as Novalis is no exception; he strove to be unique and master of his own existence and style, although the evidence shows that the poetic art of Shakespeare vitally contributed to the fruition of the Hymnen an die Nacht.

Sonnets 94, 116, and 129 are unique in their mode and function. They are general, impersonal, deliberately detached from the conflicts explored in surrounding sonnets. However, the model created in each sonnet breaks down, resulting in heightened conflict in ensuing sonnets. Sonnet 94 creates a hypothetical “they” who share the conventional Petrarchan beloved’s incorruptible beauty and self-possession. But as the sonnet proceeds, the model collapses, and the corruption of the friend is painfully confronted in Sonnets 95 and 96. Similarly, the abstract model of perfect love in 116 is qualified in the couplet and destroyed in Sonnet 117. Sonnet 129 begins by defining lust as, like the love of 116, absolute and inalterable, but concludes in paradox, thus serving as a paradigmatic introduction to the dark lady sonnets. These three sonnets, however detached and immobile, participate in the ceaseless flow of the sequence, reacting to or acting upon the surrounding sonnets.

Jorge Luis Borges claimed to be “the first hispanic adventurer to have arrived at Joyce's [Ulysses]” (3) when he published a translation of the novel's final page in the Argentine journal Proa in January 1925; in fact, the Spaniard Antonio Marichalar was the first to translate passages of Ulysses into Spanish—just two months earlier, in the Revista de Occidente in Madrid. One of the finest literary critics and essayists of the 1920s and 1930s, Marichalar (1893–1973) was largely responsible for circulating the works and poetics of a number of anglophone writers, including Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Liam O'Flaherty, Hart Crane, and D. H. Lawrence, among hispanophone audiences. Prior to 1924, Joyce had been mentioned briefly in the Spanish press by Marichalar, by the English travel writer Douglas Goldring, and by several others, but no one yet had substantially treated the Irish author whose work was at the center of a revolution in European literary aesthetics. Marichalar's groundbreaking article/review/translation “James Joyce in His Labyrinth” was a remarkable introduction to and adaptation of Joyce's modernist cosmopolitanism in Spain, where the author's influence remains profound.

For much of the nineteenth century, nonhuman animals shared the English stage with human performers in a series of popular, widely produced quadruped dramas. Work in animal studies and performance theory overlooks this phenomenon when it laments theater's unbroken history of animal exclusion—a notion of exclusion that quadruped dramas actually helped propagate and reinforce. The animal melodramas produced through the Victorian era featured animal characters whose appeal depended on the perceived otherness of animal actors, especially the knowledge that animals did not so much act in the drama as perform set responses to subtle, real-world cues from their trainers. Playwrights used animals' imperfect integration in the dramatic illusion to inject an uncanny sense of reality into their melodramatic plots. Their experiments with estrangement admit the difficulties of animal performance by explicitly staging animal otherness—but only as a spur to deepen human engagement with the more-than-human world.

It is probable that much yet remains to be understood about Poe's interest in science, in the South Pole, and in stories of the cosmic-voyage type, an interest manifested as early as “Hans Pfaal” and as late as Eureka. The sources proposed in this article throw light on this interest.

Changes in his expressed ideology subjected the works of Louis-Ferdinand Céline to criteria that were not all literary. Brasillach and Ezra Pound reversed themselves in the assessment of his production; so did liberal and leftist critics. Now, thirteen years after Céline's death, one can attempt a more complete and balanced approach to his works. It must be objective and use a formal angle: statistical analysis along a linguistic and structural line. A study of the vocabulary, syntax, and architecture of Céline's nine novels reveals a continuous evolution. Some changes fall into almost perfectly regular patterns: the fragmented sentence grows to macromolecular agglomerates. In Nord 14 lines are organized in one sentence, while in Voyage they are divided into 17. The overall analysis points up four different periods which do not reflect any ideological changes. Thus, the Celinian novels must be treated as a whole: considered separately, their significance is impaired. (In French)

Thomas de Quincey is one of the few prose stylists whose work is inevitably tagged with that vague suggestion of mélange des genres, “prose poetry.” Such a label, prompted by the rich “poetic” quality of his diction as well as the beautiful orbicularity of hit rhythmical periods, is enough to encourage the question, “What was the position of such a wielder of words on the controversy of his contemporaries over the language of poetry and the language of prose?” The answer takes on more interest when we recall his close association with the giants of that argument. “Like one of our own Family,” he tramped the dales of Grasmere with Wordsworth, who roundly asserted, “There neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.” He was, however, also a disciple and sacrificial benefactor of Coleridge, who called vital parts of Wordsworth's theory “useless, if not injurious,” and declared that “in every import of the word essential, which would not here involve a mere truism, there may be, is, and ought to be, an essential difference between the language of prose and of metrical composition.” Some of this disagreement may have been more apparent than real, and it is likely that if confusions of meaning had been cleared up, the two poets would have found themselves close together in their basic concept of poetry. Probably by “language” Wordsworth intended only “diction,” whereas Coleridge used the word more in the sense of “style.” Wordsworth's context, however, admits the broader interpretation and Coleridge's includes the narrower, so that on this issue there appears clear-cut disagreement. De Quincey thought that an “unfathomable chasm of chaotic schism opened between them.” Where, then, between these “mighty opposites” did De Quincey himself stand on poetic diction?