It is impossible to move very far in either the poetry or the prose of Wordsworth without meeting an explicit reference to what is at once the most ubiquitous and most nebulous term in his vocabulary—the imagination. All too often, his references to this important faculty, which holds the key to his theory of poetry, are fragmentary and confused. Nevertheless, his statements on the imagination—and particularly those of his later years—seem to point substantially in one direction: that the primary effect of imaginative power is the evocation of meaning from the material world, the manifestation of a visible object as the emblem of invisible truth. As a practicing poet, Wordsworth best embodies this effect in the most consciously and deliberately “imaginative” of all his poems—The White Doe of Rylstone. But in order fully to appreciate his achievement in this regrettably neglected work, it is necessary first to consider the process of emblemization as Wordsworth himself conceived and described it.

William Hazlitt's ideas about the imagination have received widespread critical attention, but that attention has been confined almost entirely to his comments on the sympathetic imagination. There can be no question of the importance of sympathy in Hazlitt's understanding of the imagination; it is a central idea with moral, philosophical, political, and aesthetic ramifications in Hazlitt's thought. But it does not by any means sum up Hazlitt's ideas about the imagination as an aesthetic or creative faculty; and since sympathy alone is clearly incapable of creating a work of art, emphasis on that quality obscures Hazlitt's more nearly complete understanding of artistic creation and appreciation. Furthermore, his application of sympathetic doctrine is rather more limited than is generally understood. I propose here to suggest some of these limits and to investigate the major supplements to sympathy in Hazlitt's criticism—associational aesthetics and the formative imagination.

Just as Defoe had maintained that the novel could surpass the pulpit in encouraging morality, so Richardson explicitly declared his intention of making Clarissa nothing less than an instrument of reviving the Christian religion:

The year 1966 marks the fiftieth anniversary of José Echegaray's death, and as yet a definitive study of his theater has not been made. Therefore, it would seem to be an appropriate time to take the first step toward a more complete examination of his work in order to point out several characteristics which are incompatible with the superficial labels attached to him and which blind one to the more meaningful ideas often present in his plays.

Cleanth Brooks wrote recently that the early story, “Fifty Grand,” “presents Hemingway's basic theme quite as well as The Old Man and the Sea.” “Nor do I think,” he continued, “that Hemingway in his most recent story now finds the world any more meaningful than he once found it.” For once Mr. Brooks was following rather than initiating opinion. Ever since The Old Man and the Sea was published, critics have admitted that in its effect upon the reader the book is somehow different from Hemingway's earlier work. Those who like the difference and those who do not have tried to account for it in many ways, most of them familiar to readers of the early reviews and of the surprisingly few later readings of the story. But to a man commentators have assumed that whatever the story's new impact—whatever the nature of that affirmative power most readers have felt—it reflects no essential change in Hemingway's view of an inscrutable natural order in which, ultimately, man can play no part. I want to suggest, on the contrary, that The Old Man and the Sea reveals Hemingway's successful achievement at last of a coherent metaphysical scheme—of a philosophical naturalism which, although largely mechanistic in principle, embraces the realm of human affairs and gives transcendent meaning to the harsh inevitabilities Hemingway has always insisted upon recording.

Among the early reactions to Stifter's Nachsommer, one year after its publication, was Hebbel's derisive criticism of the detailed and exhaustive description of objects in the novel. Hebbel's criticism was unkind, but superficially pertinent, because description does indeed abound in Nachsommer. However, the mass of detail that he ridiculed is precisely a source of fascination for modern scholars, who seize upon the number of objects as the distinguishing characteristic of this novel and accord it high esteem because of the very significance of the “things” in it.

Sainte-Beuve au travail. On se l'imagine assis, soit à, son bureau chargé de livres, soit dans une bibliothèque, se documentant avec soin. Gros travailleur, il n'a que sa plume pour gagnepain. Meurtri dans sa vie sentimentale, il se cloître dans l‘étude, il se fait l'esclave de son labeur. Son existence n'a rien en commun avec celle de ses collègues comme Jules Janin ou Loève-Veimars qui, mondains, boulevardiers, familiers des coulisses, tiennent la rubrique théâtrale d'un journal. Sainte-Beuve n'a pas leur verve fantaisiste ni leur talent pour prendre le pouls au public. Quoique n'exerçant la profession de critique qu'à contre-cceur, il prend son métier en particulier et les lettres en général trop au sérieux pour bâcler chaque soir un nombre requis de lignes sur le premier vaudeville venu.

The english Romantics had a special affinity for metaphors and similes of inner eyes, inner ears, and inner senses. These ancient and commonplace figures are widely pervasive and often conspicuously prominent in the literature of the period, appearing under myriad modifications and serving a wide variety of functions. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats used them in some of the most familiar and pivotal passages in their works, apparently seeking to charge them with new meaning. In fact, these figures are so prominent in Romantic literature that they must have been found serviceable to some particularly urgent expressive need of the time. I believe it was the Romantics' intense preoccupation with psychological theory, and the particular types of psychological theory they wished to support and oppose, which led them to explore and exploit afresh the possibilities of inner-sense figures.

The term “objectivity,” as well as several other words which have been used as its synonyms—“restraint,” “disinterestedness,” “neutrality,” “dispassionateness,” “detachment,” “impersonality,” and “indifference”—has been applied by critics to Chekhov's fiction from his own day to the present, sometimes in disparagement, but usually in praise. In various remarks about his own works or writing in general which he let fall in his correspondence, Chekhov himself used one or another of these critical labels. As early as 10 May 1886, writing to his brother Alexander, he listed “thorough objectivity” (ob”ektyvnost' splošnaja) as one of several conditions of true art. But in spite of the ubiquity of the term in his own vocabulary and that of his interpreters, its value as a critical tool has been practically nullified by the extreme imprecision with which the latter have usually handled it.

Certain Aspects of modern critical theory can be defined in terms of its use—or rather, misuse—of Aristotle's Poetics, especially of Aristotle's conception of plot and his statement that poetry deals with universals rather than particulars. The same, of course, can be said of other periods as well. Sidney's view of Aristotle, for example, was confined to the notion that a poem was an imitation of an action, but he platonized even this conception by claiming that the action imitated was an ideal one—what ought to be rather than what is—and this, as we shall see, became quite a common distortion of the famous passage at the beginning of the ninth chapter of the Poetics. The other side of the coin is found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' concern with the genres and the unities and their supposed rules. It cannot be said that Aristotle has been a vital influence on literary criticism since the nineteenth century, except for the current minority report being filed by the Chicago Critics, but these two aspects of the Poetics nevertheless offered a support and a challenge to certain nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics for clarifying their own ideas about poetry.

Surréalisme, n.m. Automatisme psychique pur par lequel on se propose d'exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit de tout autre manière, le fonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l'absence de tout contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique ou morale. ENCYCL. Philos. Le surréalisme repose sur la croyance à la réalité supérieure de certaines formes d'associations négligées jusqu'à lui, à la toute-puissance du rêve, au jeu désintéressé de la pensée. Il tend à ruiner définitivement tous les autres mécanismes psychiques et à se substituer à eux dans la résolution des principaux problèmes de la vie.

The history of criticism is largely the history of the changing questions we ask about works of art. The pre-eminence in our time of Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce, and the connection of these writers with an artistic method and a mode of thought that Eliot, in reviewing Joyce's Ulysses, has himself called mythical—all this leads me to ask about Browning's use of myth. The question seems particularly relevant since Yeats and Browning had in common an intense admiration for Shelley. Now Yeats, we know, admired not Shelley the Godwinian radical, but Shelley the Platonist and mythmaker—the Shelley who, in the manner of Blake, used archetypal symbols. The question is whether Browning—who did for a time admire Shelley the Godwinian radical—had affinities also with Shelley the mythmaker and (the two terms are inextricably connected) symbolist.