Gray's Sonnet on the Death of Richard West has never recovered from the judgment visited upon it by Wordsworth, for whom it neatly demonstrated how Gray “was more than any other man curiously elaborate in the structure of his own poetic diction.” Scholars in recent times have been harsh: “Characteristically Gray wrote in English a stilted sonnet on West's death and put his genuine feelings into the Latin verses that he appended to his philosophical fragment, De principiis cogitandi. Not enough of a romantic to wear his heart on his sleeve, he concealed his emotions in classical Latin.” The following essay may show to what degree, if any, the work is “stilted” and the emotions are “concealed”; more directly, however, it is intended to show what kind of poem Gray was writing, and to consider whether he sought again to accomplish the sonnet's intentions in the Elegy.

The greatest poetry, according to Hazlitt, is the “truest” poetry and therefore the most passionate; for, to communicate the essential truths of nature, a poet must feel intensely. Lesser poetry falls short by offering a limited or “abstracted” view of nature. This abstraction may be due to imitating other poets, as in the “poetry of common places”; to the poet's preoccupation with his own experience, as in the “poetry of paradox”; or to the use of “articial” materials, as in the “poetry of wit.” Each kind lacks the truth of great poetry, for each kind, in one way or another, limits the range or depth of feeling. But whereas the “poetry of common places” and the “poetry of paradox” simply have the qualities of great poetry to a lesser degree, the “poetry of wit” has a “kind and degree of excellence” of its own.

In The Great Chain of Being Professor Lovejoy pointed out that in the eighteenth century a profound change took place in the ways of thinking about the universe—from conceiving of it as static and complete to conceiving of it as organic and infinitely changing. Recently, in The Subtler Language, Earl Wasserman has discussed the acute artistic problems that this shift in thought created for the poet. Until the end of the eighteenth century there were certain “cosmic syntaxes” in the public domain such as the Christian interpretation of history and the concept of the great chain of being which the poet could expect his audience to recognize and accept. He “could transform language by means of them, and could survey reality and experience in the presence of the world these syntaxes implied… By the nineteenth century these world pictures had passed from consciousness for the purpose of public poetry, and no longer did men share in any significant degree a sense of cosmic design.” Therefore, says Wasserman, the Romantic poets—and poets ever since—have been forced to formulate their own cosmic syntax and “shape the autonomous poetic reality that the cosmic syntax permits.”

Everyone who knows the life of Johnson remembers his revelation to Boswell of what first set him “thinking in earnest of religion,” after a youth spent mostly in indifference toward it, and in lax talking against it. This laxity, he said, “lasted till I went to Oxford, where it would not be suffered. When at Oxford I took up ‘Law's Serious Call to a Holy Life,‘ expecting to find it a dull book, (as such books generally are), and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion, after I became capable of rational inquiry.” Everyone accepts this as a significant event in Johnson's life, and nearly every book written since either about Johnson or Law repeats it. There has been, however, a curious indifference among Johnsonian scholars toward examining its significance, or considering the possibility that Law's influence on him may have extended beyond this admittedly important event in his young manhood. Mrs. Thrale was the only person I know of in his own day who suspected a real debt to Law in his writings, and since his death, with the exception of those critics who have surmised an influence of Law's “portraits” on some of Johnson's character-sketches in the Rambler, there have been, I believe, only two who have seen Law's influence at work on the mature Johnson.

Probably no reader of Hawthorne's four major novels can have failed to notice the similarities which exist among certain of the participating heroines. It would seem that if a lady had handled her first assignment well, Hawthorne could nearly always manage to find a place for her in his next production. Hence, not only did Hester of The Scarlet Letter turn up again as Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance and as Miriam in The Marble Faun, but, even more obviously, Phoebe of The House of the Seven Gables later found parts as Priscilla in Blithedale and Hilda in The Marble Faun.

Coleridge considered Resolution and Independence a flawed masterpiece. He says of it (Biographia Literaria, Chap, xxii): “Indeed this fine poem is especially characteristic of the author. There is scarce a defect or excellence in his writings of which it would not present a specimen.” It is singular that Coleridge, who did so much to undermine the eighteenth century school of “faults and beauties” in Shakespeare criticism, should have dealt with Wordsworth in this fashion. When Wordsworth talked of the old man, as he became to the poetic imagination, “motionless as a cloud” or “wandering about alone and silently,” Coleridge was content; but when he tried to fix the old man in the here and now of 1802, Coleridge took offence and accused him of inconstancy of style. It is true that many of the corrections Wordsworth made in the poem were prompted by Coleridge's critique; but what is useful criticism to a craftsman is not necessarily so to his patrons.

In his discerning book entitled Emerson's Angle of Vision, Sherman Paul has pointed out two fundamental ways in which Whitehead, in spite of some obvious differences, is like Emerson. Both Emerson and Whitehead, says Paul, exalted the moral, ethical, and imaginative science of the seventeenth century over the analytical rationalism of the eighteenth century, and, as a logical consequence of this emphasis, both condemned Lockean sensationalism in the same way. Following Professor Paul's suggestion, the purpose of this study is to explore in some detail the basic views of Emerson and Whitehead about religion—man's relation to Nature and God. The remarkable similarities between the views of Emerson and those of Whitehead on this subject may not indicate much, if any, indebtedness of the twentieth-century philosopher to his nineteenth-century predecessor, but if these parallels are extensive and important enough, they may well indicate that Whitehead's total achievement in the philosophy of religion is like that of Emerson—that, religiously, Whitehead may be said to be a kind of twentieth-century Emerson, in one important way, as may appear, more of a transcendentalist than Emerson. Indeed, though the obscurity of his style will prevent him from being as popular as his predecessor, Whitehead's influence as a leader in the religious revolt against the “philosophy of logical analysis” and the other philosophies that make ours an “age of analysis” may in time be as great as that of Emerson in the similar romantic-transcendentalist revolt against the analytical rationalism of the age of “Enlightenment.” More of this later, but first let us examine the evidence.

Few stories captured and held Byron's imagination as tenaciously as that of Francesca da Rimini. In addition to its association with Dante, who became one of his favorite poets, there was evidently something about the tragedy of love involving a married woman, her husband, and her husband's brother that Byron found especially fascinating. The many amorous triangles in his poetical narratives, as well as the exaltation of romantic love sanctified not by religion but rather by sincere emotion, show that he was temperamentally sympathetic with the basic elements of Francesca's adulterous passion. In his customary way of assimilating whatever he admired, he even identified himself and his halfsister, Augusta Leigh, with Dante's unfortunate lovers of Rimini. After frequent recourse to the story of Francesca, Byron associated himself with it to such an extent that he interwove his own autobiography with it and, I believe, reflected the original tragedy as a strangely configured, though curiously revealing, tragicomedy in the first canto of Don Juan.

Concerning Gérard de Nerval it has been said, of late, that the hour of synthesis is at hand. This is particularly true of “El Desdichado,” for most authors of the increasingly voluminous literature devoted to this sonnet have taken an extrinsic approach; that is, they have applied techniques of other fields, such as psychiatry, biography, astrology, and alchemy. At best they have helped to elucidate hitherto obscure symbols; at worst they have made of their thesis a kind of Procrustean bed on which the poem has been either stretched to death or decapitated.

Rarement idéal poétique a été porté plus haut que celui, “enfant d'une nuit d'Idumée,” distillé dans les poèmes de Mallarmé; du moins ceux de la derniere période par lesquels, ayant cédé “l'initiative aux mots,” le Poete d'un meme mouvement decouvre et se fond à, “la notion pure.” II y a quelques années M. Albérès remarquait, a propos des exigences morales d'une génération représentée par les héros de Bernanos, Anouilh, Malraux, Julien Green, Camus ou Sartre, que notre époque, “à la suite d'autres époquès qui ont institué une morale de l'honneur, comme le treizieme siecle, ou une morale de la pudeur comme le dix-septième siècle,” institue à, son tour “une morale de la sincérité.” C'est-à-dire une morale fondée sur “un désir éperdu” d'authenticité absolue vis-a vis de soi-même, dans le bien comme dans le mal. Puisque M. Albérès nous invite à faire d'audacieux rapprochements avec d'autres epoques, il serait interessant d'opposer à cette “obsession de la sincérité” une obsession de la génération qui précéda celle de Sartre: l'obsession de la pureté.

In an age when symbols are being discovered in literary works where critics of an earlier period would never have dreamed of looking for them there is probably little need to defend a study of symbolism in Grillparzer's work. Indeed Grillparzer himself recognized that there is a symbolic element in all art and reproached his own time for its refusal to acknowledge the symbolic aspect of poetic truth. Das goldene Vließ, moreover, is not the only drama in which Grillparzer uses symbols. In Sappho, for instance, the lyre, the laurel wreath, the rose, the statue of Aphrodite, and the dagger all have symbolic significance. Even the title of Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen reflects symbolic motifs. In that drama subtle variations on the water imagery predominate but are reinforced by symbols such as the dove, the tower, the Leda song, and the lamp. In Libussa, to cite one more example, there is a highly developed circle symbolism as well as symbolism involving flowers, vegetation, and metals.

Until the appearance of James Grossman's biography in 1949, James Fenimore Cooper's last five novels had received little critical attention. The nineteenth century practically ignored them. Even William Cullen Bryant in his judicious memorial address delivered in 1852 passed over them with hardly a word, while thirty years later, Thomas R. Lounsbury flatly stated that “not one of them has the slightest pretension to be termed a work of art.” In the twentieth century, the first critics to concern themselves with the rehabilitation of Cooper's reputation—Vernon L. Parrington, Robert E. Spiller, and Yvor Winters—concerned as they were with the broader aspects of Cooper's thought, devoted little space to the discussion of tales that were not especially pertinent to their immediate purposes. During the last dozen years, however, the novels have begun to attract more attention, with Harold H. Scudder and W. B. Gates in particular pointing out various sources that Cooper used in composing two of the tales. Among the critics, Grossman has written the fullest analyses of the individual books, and, most recently, Howard Mumford Jones and Charles A. Brady have each treated the late novels at some length. All three have pointed out the strong religious emphasis apparent in several of them.

Friedrich Theodor Vischer has sometimes been called the Lessing of the nineteenth century. In certain aspects of their lives the parallel is striking. They were the sons of clergymen and were expected to follow in their fathers' footsteps, but each turned to other pursuits. Liberal thinking, particularly in theology, though differing fundamentally in texture, brought them into conflict with traditional orthodoxy. They were both critics in the field of aesthetics and both were men of letters in the narrower sense; Lessing alone, however, gained a position of distinction in literature.