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?

Gaston bachelard a montré que les éléments matériels pouvaient servir de catégories adéquates pour étudier la sensibilité et le tempérament de maint auteur. Les poètes lui ont évidemment fourni un terrain d'élection. Plus remarquable est le fait que la plus abstraite philosophie utilise d'une manière caractéristique des métaphores et des images tirées des quatre éléments matériels. Il s'agit d'ailleurs de quelque chose de plus essentiel que ce qu'on entend d'ordinaire par “image” et “métaphore”. En regard de la pensée abstraite, ces deux termes sont compris à titre d'ornements grâce auxquels le philosophe égaie son exposé aride et le rend plus frappant. Mais le fait que “l'image” nous aide à fixer une théorie en notre esprit tendrait déjà à montrer qu'il s'agit là non d'un ornement, mais d'une pénétration intuitive que ne saurait remplacer totalement une suite d'abstractions sans relation visible à la vie. On objectera qu'une telle attitude est le plus sûr moyen de mal interpréter une doctrine: La faute en est alors à l'auteur, et non au lecteur. C'est l'auteur qui a mal interprété sa propre doctrine en se laissant aller à des “images” superficielles et ornementales.

It well-known that Byron's poetry was the center of a great deal of suspicious attention from the Tory government which was almost continually in office during his career. David V. Erdmann has proposed that the ministry's anxiety was grounded upon the fear of a potential insurrection to be led by Lord Byron; W. H. Wick war sees the official reaction to Byron's poems as of the whole cloth of the government's antipathy to a free and virulently outspoken press. But whatever the attitude of the ministry, the only official actions taken to punish Byron for his poetry were ostensibly the result of moral rather than of political trespasses on his part. Were Byron the only author subjected to punishment on these grounds, it would be obvious that the action was politically motivated, but Robert Southey, poet laureate, received identical treatment. The nature of the penalty—refusal by Chancery to recognize literary property rights—indicates that the fountainhead of the measures taken against Byron's Don Juan and Cain, Southey's Wat Tyler, Shelley's Queen Mab, and the works of several other authors, Whig, Tory, and apolitical, lay in the moral and legal principles of the Chancellor, Lord Eldon.

In a note appended to his novel The Fountain (New York, 1932), Charles Morgan explains why he names certain of his characters as he does. “A novelist,” he says, “may suggest ancient nobility in England by an invented name, but the great aristocracy of Holland is so narrowly restricted arid so well known that any fictitious title would give a false, and probably ridiculous, impression. I have therefore been bound to choose, in van Leyden, the name of a noble family extinct before my own sojourn in Holland. It has the right ring” (p. 450). Certainly few novelists treating of “ancient nobility in England” have allowed themselves to be hampered by any such scruples as Morgan's; and a complete peerage (and baronetage) of British fiction, running from magnates as illustrious as the Pallisers, Dukes of Omnium, and the Tanville-Tankertons, Dukes of Dorset, down to such small fry as Sir Pitt Crawley and Sir Alastair Digby-Vane-Trumpington, Barts., would be an imposing monument to the exuberance of the story-writer's fertility in the invention of “aristocratic” names and titles. It has not perhaps been sufficiently remarked that Jane Austen's practice in this matter stands in rather striking contrast to that of most of her fellow novelists; that when she creates families with any pretensions to gentle birth, she almost always endows them with names belonging to actual British families, sometimes with an extinct title of nobility, sometimes with a living one.

The vital statistics on Tomás Carrasquilla have hitherto baffled not only scholars and librarians, but even the members of his own family. One authority suggests 1865 as the year of his birth; another, 1851. The most conservative estimate, which “splits the difference,” as it were, favors 19 January 1858, the date accepted by Carrasquilla's family. In Santo Domingo, Colombia, I discovered on a baptismal certificate that “en la iglesia parroquial de Santo Domingo a veinticuatro de enero de mil ochocientos cincuenta y ocho, yo el cura interino que suscribo, bauticé solemnemente a un niño de un día de nacido a quien nombré Tomás María hijo legítimo de Rafael Carrasquilla y Ecilda Naranjo vecinos de esta parroquia,” so that, on the strength of this document, the actual date of Carrasquilla's birth appears to have been 23 January 1858.

In a familiar passage from a letter to W. S. Landor, Wordsworth exposed, as I see it, the central purpose of his art: “Even in poetry it it the imaginative only ... that which is conversant (with), or turns upon infinity, that powerfully affects me.” “Things,” he said, had to be lost in each other and limita to vanish; otherwise he was indifferent. The argument of this essay is intended to suggest an approach to Wordsworth at the poetic level of infinity. This is the realm of pure universals, the insight of poetry which reveals a state of being independent of sensuous limitations. In the sense of Hegel it is the level of reality, possessing a wholly independent being, as opposed to that of appearance, depending wholly in its existence upon the senses. The exact nature of reality remains, of course, a question for pure philosophy; and it is probable that the discipline of philosophy rather than that of literary criticism must judge finally the dialectic of poetry concerned with infinity. Yet the highest attainment of the fine arts is clearly an act of turning upon the infinite, an invocation in the observer or the listener of a sense of endlessness. Medium, form, and technique are the approaches to the ultimate experience inherent in a particular work. As artistic acts from the world of appearance, they may be analyzed and defined by the particular critical disciplines concerned with them. At the end of these functions lies the problem of philosophy. What is the nature of the wholly independent being which all great art attains? Wordsworth implies in his statement to Landor that awareness of the infinite is the final objective of poetry. My purpose is to investigate the method of Wordsworth's thought at the threshold of this objective rather than to define philosophically what the sense of infinity, in itself, contains. It seems clear that nothing more need be said upon the imaginative process as this is explored in Wordsworth's Prefaces or interpreted by his critics.

In biographical sketches written before 1800 both Dr. Robert Anderson and Dr. John Moore considered the History and Adventures of an Atom (1769) as unquestionably the work of Tobias Smollett. In fact, almost from the day of its publication to the present nearly everyone has regarded this burlesque history as the hot-tempered Scot's mocking farewell salute to English politics and politicians. Yet in all this time no valid external evidence proving or disproving the authorship has been found. For this reason, and perhaps others, some uncertainty about it has developed. Lewis M. Knapp in his authoritative Tobias Smollett (1949, pp. 281–283) finds that the Adventures of an Atom contains “in its method and material much that is Smollettian” and is “obviously what Smollett felt like writing at that time,” but calling attention to the lack of external evidence, asks, “Is it, indeed, possible that Smollett did not write the Atom at all?”

Newell Ford has recently sent several bombshells into the ranks of Keatsians by utterly rejecting allegorical interpretation of Endymion. His accomplice, out of the past, is Amy Lowell, but all of the real ammunition belongs to Ford. With admirable persistence and patience he has brought heavy critical guns to bear on the allegorical fortress and has finally demolished it, as he believes, in the name of truth. The time has come, surely, to make a stand against this total destruction and reconsider the question, “Is Endymion an allegory?”

Of all the “winged words” of Goethe's Faust those of its closing lines,

have probably flown farthest, and they have always been impressive and memorable. On the other hand, one cannot help feeling that the standard interpretation of them does not do justice to their lofty position in the ultimate summary statement of the drama. The commentaries almost invariably relate these lines to the last scene only, that of Faust's salvation and elevation, rather than to the drama as a whole.

Erich Schmidt's thrilling discovery of the proto-form of Goethe's Faust came at a fateful hour. In the year 1887 the mechanistic evolutionism of the natural sciences still reigned almost unchallenged even in the field of literary criticism, which on the academic level at least was mainly philological in nature with occasional purple patches of “appreciation.” The philologist, regarding the Urfaust as a sort of “missing link,” pounced upon it and, in order to make it fit his hypotheses, tore it to pieces. The result was the famous “shred theory” of its genesis, the Fetzentheorie advanced by some of scholarship's most respected names— most notably perhaps, certainly most influentially, by Gustav Roethe, first chairman of the Goethe-Gesellschaft and disciple of Wilhelm Scherer. Even before the discovery of the Urfaust Scherer had of course made far-reaching conjectures regarding the original form and order of composition of Faust.In an essay first published in 1920 Roethe succeeded in reducing the Urfaust to no less than forty-one “shreds,” each of which, according to him, could have been written “at one sitting” (p. 676). Roethe's concept of the work is well summed up in the following words (p. 654): “Goethe, especially in his youth, was inclined to seize first upon that which he felt a strong urge to give form to and more than once he left it up to a later redaction whether the precious ‘patches’ (‘Fetzen‘) were to be sewn into a garment or not. The Urfaust, now, I regard as a provisional collection and redaction of such patches.” This might have been a harmless enough sort of game had not the players taken it upon themselves to cry down all attempts at esthetic interpretation which did not subscribe to their conjectures. Thus Roethe (p. 643) dismisses J. Minor's (not entirely consistent) effort to read the Urfaust as a work in its own right as unsuccessful because Minor slights problems of genesis. The idea that there might be some organic relationship between form and content seems to fill Roethe with a sense of the absurd—this approach he calls “a great, even mystic, overbending of the bow” (p. 677). No, for him the Urfaust remains “a tack, filled with little scraps of paper,” such as it had come down in legend, thanks to A. W. Schlegel.

What did Lytton Strachey mean when he insisted in the Preface to Eminent Victorians and elsewhere that the biographer should have a clear and definite point of view? When we have answered this question, we are certain to encounter another: Was Strachey right? Should biography be written from a fixed point of view? Is there a danger that the biographer with a rigid point of view will treat his subject as a victim forced to lie upon the bed of Procrustes?

While Edmund Burke was a student at Trinity College, his native Dublin was rocked by the agitation of the celebrated patriot and apothecary, Charles Lucas (1713–71), who wished to restore the ancient rights of the freemen of the city which was then governed as a closed oligarchy by the Board of Aldermen. Tension was heightened when one of Dublin's representatives to the Irish House of Commons died on 16 August 1748 and Lucas quickly issued the first of twenty addresses in support of his candidacy for the seat. Lucas pandered to the mob—his “most thoroughly beloved brethren and friends”—and begged them to believe he was and ever would be theirs “with the utmost Sincerity, true Respect, unfeigned Love, and boundless Gratitude.” He avowed the noblest intentions: “No man, let his Pretensions, or his Places, be what they will, loves his Country better than I. It is this that prompts me to attempt the Restoration of her Constitution to its natural Strength and Vigour.” His appeal was directed primarily to the Protestant freeholders of Dublin, who were struggling to supplant the clique dominating political life in the interests of the Viceroy and his “undertakers” with officials and a parliament representative of their views. Lucas wished to inspire these freemen to achievements as great as those of the citizens of Rome or Athens.

All of Burke's major biographers have said that he edited Dodsley's Annual Register and wrote its famous Historical Article from 1758 to at least twenty-five years beyond that time. Such statements have been made without the support of an iota of evidence. As a result Burke's share in the Annual Register still remains to be determined. The subject has held the interest of contemporary scholars. Donald Cross Bryant in his account of Burke's literary friendships devotes a separate chapter to the problem. The most recent study of Burke, Thomas A. Copeland's Our Eminent Friend Edmund Burke (New Haven, 1949), contains two such chapters. The matter receives special consideration in Sir Philip Magnus' life of Burke, the latest biography as of today. Burke's other biographers were also interested in his editorship. Macknight observed that “the value ... of the Annual Registers to one who should undertake to write Burke's political history, cannot be exaggerated” (I, XI). Robert Murray says, “It is a valuable source of information on the growth of his thought from 1758 to 1791” (p. 83).