For mankind in the total orphanage which is this world homeostasis is well served by the diverse learning—as knowledge and as process—with which the members of the Modern Language Association of America are professionally concerned: language as communication and rhetoric, literature as a means of heightened understanding, and the systematic study of these relevant areas of knowledge in the interest of effective instruction in them.

Metrical organization exists more importantly in the pattern constructions of the listener than in the physical signal. It serves a major function in control of attention, as prosodic features do in daily speech. The accents of speech are timed attention peaks, presenting meanings for which they prepare our attention in advance. Metrical organization fosters expectancy through larger durations—metrical stanzas are larger expectancy spans. The metrical effect is not a mere physical drumbeat; it is an atmosphere of shaped sustained expectancy. Perception is an active process, in which the perceiver contributes pattern. The rhythm of speech is a conspicuous example of such contribution. A technique for investigating and demonstrating the order contributed by meter is provided by unled choral reading.

Assonance—the repetition of a vowel sound in stressed syllables near enough to affect the ear—has been as important as alliteration. Such vowel echoes have been employed in three chief ways. They have been simply harmonious, as in Swift's “So rotting Celia stroles the street / When sober folks are all in bed,” where the echo of [i] and [o] may be more pleasing to the ear than the two alliterations. Assonance has been used for structural effects and for emphasis: it has bound adjective to noun, from Beowulf's “ēōwralēōde”—a popular formula—to Thomas' title “The White Giant's Thigh”; it has bound the lines of a couplet, as in Spenser's “All in a vele of silke and silver thin / That hid no whit her alablaster skin”; it can emphasize rhythmical stresses, as in Shakespeare's “Do I delight to die, or life desire”; it can emphasize rhetorically balancing words, the names in Butler's “Didst inspire Witers, Prin, and Vickears,” or the verbs in Dr. Johnson's zeugma “No dangers fright him and no labors tire.” Assonance can also be onomatopoeic when it repeats the vowel of a key word, as in Pope's “Now pleasing sleep had seal'deach mortal eye; / Stretch'din their tents the Grecian leaders lie.”

WITH THE REEMERGENCE of the classics in the Italian Renaissance, particularly Homer, the concept of a Christian hero as distinct from the Christian champion arose to shape an enormous body of European literature. Broadly speaking, we may describe Christian heroism as aspiring to create an ideal figure, reminiscent of both the chivalric knight and the Christian Everyman, who might fit into a heroic poem that should at the same time rival and eclipse the epics of classical antiquity.1 Perhaps the first poem approaching such dimensions was Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, a superlative romance, but with more tenuous claims to either Christian or heroic values. Ovid, not Virgil, remains clearly the main inspiration for Ariosto's playfully pagan sensuosity, and only by strenuous allegorical interpretation can Christianity be construed as a major force in the poem. Significantly, however, such interpretation was by no means lacking in sixteenth-century Italy, where a host of commentators eagerly supplied it. Concurrently in Portugal Camoens could describe Vasco da Gama's daring voyage with a truly missionary zeal and so create a narrative where heroic action genuinely dramatizes the virtues of the Christian faith. But except for one peculiar episode the Lusiadas lacks the dimension of romance. The curious allegory of the Island of Love with which the epic concludes is apparently evidence of Camoens' felt need to define however hastily his military hero's relation to a world of pastoral romance, where hero and lover are inseparable.

MOST modern criticism of King Lear directs itself resolutely against the notion, said to be held by some critics, that the play forms part of the Christian tradition, that it ultimately affirms the victory of good over evil, specifically, the victory of love over hate, and that it therefore makes virtue prevail in the end.1 On the contrary, Dr. Johnson felt that “Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice” (“Notes” to King Lear), and the majority of modern critics holds, as Swinburne did,2 that the play is deeply pessimistic, that in writing King Lear Shakespeare deliberately examined such Christian concepts as divine providence, retributive justice, or the existence of some universal moral order, and came to the conclusion that at best man's world was a “great stage of fools” (iv.vi.182), whose false sense of security should make the philosopher chuckle; or that at worst it was a “wheel of fire” (iv.vii.47) upon which not only Lear but every man is bound, an image that should make the poet cry in agony.3

Critics have said that Niebla shows both the protagonist's emergence into conscious existence and the author's attempt to create himself through the novel. But the plot repeatedly points up the character's self-deception, which makes the author's effort problematical. Niebla begins with a comic view of Augusto Pérez's falling in love with the image of a woman he has invented; it ends with a philosophical defense of the confusion of fiction and reality. The ambiguity caused by these incompatible approaches is heightened by the similarities between Augusto's ideas and Unamuno's. The ironic exposure of selfdelusion alternates with a serious theory of fantasy. In the last chapters Unamuno, like Augusto, seems to argue for total delusion. This view is most explicitly formulated in the “Historia de Niebla” which appeared as a prologue to the 1935 edition. In it Unamuno fuses legend, novel, nivola, and eternal life into the image of a communal mist in which one can be saved. Throughout his life Unamuno tried to see himself as a substantial entity and not merely an idea in the minds of others. As that goal became more elusive, he chose instead to imagine that the world was a dream in which he could be eternally represented. In order to perpetuate his illusory self, he turned all reality into fiction. Niebla anticipates this maneuver.

Two allegorical movements dominate the central books of the Faerie Queene, the generative cycle and Britomart's quest for Artegall. Britomart's assumption of her role as mother of the British line depends on the reconciliation of these two movements, the one natural, the other historical. The Garden of Adonis presents an emblem of the generative cycle, the desire of Venus for Adonis mirroring the desire of Form for union with Matter. This search of the Female for the Male is presented sequentially in the story of Florimell and Marinell, whose adventures are juxtaposed with those of Britomart and therefore form a bridge between the emblem of the Garden and the sequence of Britomart's quest. We see the coalescence of the two in Isis Church, where Britomart's dream has both sexual and historical significance, and in her resumption of femininity after her rescue of Artegall from Radigund.

French classical literature betrays not the reason by which it is usually characterized, but a largely unsuccessful striving for rational control of the irrational. The literary treatments of the beast and monster in seventeenth-century works indicate both the power of the irrational and the similarity of various authors' responses to it. Descartes's beast-machine theory and Pascal's adaptation of it represent efforts to mechanize and regulate unreason. The failure of this attempt in Pascal's Pensées is signaled by the “monster,” an expression of that incomprehensibility which compels human reason to abdicate. The monster in Racine's Phèdre is an irrational force which the protagonists dream of conquering, but by which they themselves are finally conquered. Continued belief that French classicism flourished in an “age of reason” is in effect a prolongation of the same illusion found in the literature of that time.

Considering the way Poe and Tennyson admired each other's work, it is strange that the tonal and thematic convergence of two such major nineteenth-century writers has scarcely been sensed in Anglo-American (as contrasted to French) literary criticism. The quality that most obviously tempts the reader to link them, their extraordinary delight in sound for its own sake, became a comparable strategy in the service of an undogmatic philosophical idealism, the attempt of the spirit to escape the gross materiality and cloying passions of the world's body. The symbolic situations in Tennyson's early poetry and in Poe's stories and poems suggest the dream-shrouded entrapment of the poetic soul within the world's “deserted” (Tennyson) or “haunted” (Poe) houses. Even when Tennyson rejects, ambiguously enough, the self-entombments of Poe-like hyperesthetic souls, he hardly suppresses what Poe called his unequaled “etherisity” and “ideality.” Tennyson's resultant treatment of angelism (to apply to his protagonists Allen Tate's term for the hypertrophied state of Poe's heroes) and the concomitant evolution of a Poe-like Fatal Woman are most clearly evident in such Classical monologues as “Lucretius” and in the conception of Lancelot and Guinevere in the Idylls of the King.

Because The Ring and the Book is such a towering imaginative achievement, readers and critics alike have slighted those poems which Browning wrote and published soon after 1868. This is especially true of Balaustion's Adventure (1871), the poet's next work after The Ringand the Book. Largely given over to a retelling of Euripides' Alkestis, it has perplexed most critics, many of them wondering whether it should be considered as anything more than a mere transla tion. Browning himself made few claims for it. In the dedication to the Countess Cowper he re ferred to it as a task that “proved the most delightful of May-month amusements,”1 and to Isabella Blagden he spoke of it as “my little new Poem,—done in a month,—and I think a pretty thing in its way.”2 Calling it “Exhaustion's Impos ture,” Rossetti found “the structure of the work beyond all conception perverse” and the Euripidean Alkestis “interlarded with Browningian analysis to an extent beyond all reason or relation to things by any possibility Greek in any way.”3 Swinburne, discovering “fine things in it,” thought that “the pathos of the subject is too simple and downright for Browning's analytic method.”4 Later commentators have likewise been worried by the question of its faithfulness to the Greek spirit.6 The purpose of this essay is to suggest that such a consideration is largely irrelevant to an estimation of the poem which both William Clyde DeVane and Robert Langbaum claim belongs with the works of Browning's best period.6

A close literary analysis of the text shows that Schweyk im Zweiten Weltkrieg is an artful antimorality play with parodistic parallels to Everyman and Faust. The confrontation and interrelation of the “big” and the “small” provide a thematic and structural pattern on both the political and the social levels of the play. Love, faith, and work of the “little” are exploited by the “big.” Scattered revolution and traditional virtues prove useless in an attempt to fight and survive a totalitarian system. Schweyk is caught between a “big” enemy and a “big” friend. As a typical representative of the “little man” he is pitted against Hitler, whose plans he sabotages by a devious method of opportunism mixed with opposition; as an individual he is also contrasted with the fat glutton Baloun, whom he tries to help. In both respects he is “virtuous.” However, the juxtaposition of Schweyk in the icy Russian steppes and Baloun in the cozy “Keich” inn marks two contradictory, yet interrelated extremes of human existence. Brecht subtly points the way out of these undesirable paradoxes. Only if the “little” resolve their differences will they truly cease to be “little.” Schweyk's virtues and Brecht's “Schweykian philosophy” are dictated by circumstances; they are not meant to be of permanent value.

All of the characteristics of the New Novel can be found in Proust: a search for an unknown reality, participated in by the reader whose vision of the world is thereby transformed. The unknown reality consists of ordinary events juxtaposed in such a way that they reveal a new truth or reality to the reader. The characters habitually misunderstand one another; the impossibility of really knowing anyone else makes solitude an inherent state of each character, so that any attempt at possession is necessarily absurd. The New Novelist, therefore, tries to grasp the form of society as a whole rather than to describe the life of one individual. This results in a presentation of existences rather than essences.

THROUGHOUT the nineteenth century, Art, or the Life of Art, brought with it characteristics of death, decay, dissolution, pessimism, and nihilism, even when it stood, theoretically at least, for transcendence and transformation. The world of Art, so closely akin to the unconscious and preconscious, fell into the role described for it by Plato, as “frantic and possessed.” Socrates reasons, in a well-known passage, that “the poet is an airy thing, a winged and a holy thing ; and he cannot make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his senses and no mind is left in him.”1 The Poet, the Artist, the Creator is, as we know, both ecstatic and calculating. He calls attention to thoughts and acts that lie deep within us and that we try to disguise with logic; in brief, the Artist plays on our unconscious (what we cannot control) by appealing to our consciousness (what, we think, we can control).