“Apollo's Edict” has long been cited as a typical example of Swift's attitude towards poetic cant and outworn cliché. Set down as coming from Apollo himself, the poem illustrates a number of empty conventions and extravagant similes and forbids their use by any who would be of the true school of the god; and to aid his would-be followers in their poetic efforts, Apollo has appointed Swift as his Vicegerent on earth.

The lines above, where Herder refers to the chief figures in the play Sakuntala, by the Sanskrit dramatist Kalidasa, identify India as a holy land for which he yearns. These lines might serve as a motto to characterize his attitude toward India, an attitude of extreme reverence and adulation which resulted finally in the formulation of a mythical image. The term “mythical image” implies an imaginative conception of India, and one can trace the development of such an image in the fancy of Herder.

In Browning's second letter to Elizabeth Barrett he uses the imagery of “white light” versus “prismatic hues” to represent the contrast between the full and direct reflection of her personality in lyric utterance, and the partial and oblique refraction of his own personality in the medium of the dramatic monologue. A little later, he reveals his consciousness of the limitations of his poetry through a kindred image: “these scenes and song-scraps are such mere and very escapes of my inner power, which lives in me like the light in those crazy Mediterranean phares I have watched at sea, wherein the light is ever revolving in a dark gallery, bright and alive, and only after a weary interval leaps out, for a moment, from the one narrow chink, and then goes on with the blind wall between it and you …” In response, Elizabeth Barrett, while deprecating the merit of her own poetry and paying tribute to the worth of Browning's, acknowledges the justice of his self-criticism: “and in fact, you have not written the R. B. poem yet—your rays fall obliquely rather than directly straight. I see you only in your moon” (i, 22). In one of her letters, though referring to “the glory of dramatic art,” she urges: “Yet I am conscious of wishing you to take the other crown besides—and after having made your own creatures speak in clear human voices, to speak yourself out of that personality which God made, and with the voice which he tuned into such power and sweetness of speech” (ii, 182).

When hamlet is first preparing to leave his mother's chamber after harrowing her to repentance, he turns to the dead Polonius:

For this same lord,
I do repent; but heaven hath pleas'd it so,
To punish me with this, and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister.
I will bestow him, and will answer well
The death I gave him. (III.iv.172-177)

It is well known that Shakespeare's depiction of battles was limited by space, personnel, and equipment. It is not well known why, despite Ben Jonson's instructive ridicule and his own professed awareness of these limitations, he persisted in staging battle after battle almost to the end of his career. In endorsing his statement of what was wrong with his dramatization of war, we have failed to inquire what was right about it. Principally, I believe, we have neglected to look for the aspect of warfare that steadily interested him and his audience.

In a communication to the Times Literary Supplement, J. J. Auchmuty has suggested that a study of Wordsworth as a practical politician might remedy certain traditional misconceptions about the poet's activities in his declining years. As a matter of fact, he worked assiduously at a period of his life “when, according to legend, he is supposed to have been desiccated and devoid of principle,” in attempting to influence the passage of the Copyright Act of 1842. His part in this legislation has been taken for granted by scholars on the basis of statements to several correspondents that he had written many letters in support of the measure. But there is evidence now, both published and unpublished, that for five years he labored continually in assisting Serjeant Thomas Noon Talfourd, the originator of the bill, by letters both private and public, interviews, and an official petition. While it is true that the Act promised to benefit him directly, there is no doubt that his interest in its passage was more than selfish and had its roots in what was, in effect, a struggle for survival of literature of quality in an age demanding quantity.

The Suicides of Racine, and of the seventeenth-century French theatre in general, have been studied in terms of the technical requirements pertaining to staging which developed from Greco-Roman theory and practice. This is a logical approach which cannot be dismissed, especially since in the seventeenth century the theory of bienséance was expanded to include the ethical proprieties. Nevertheless such a technical approach cannot provide full insight into Racine's intent. An adequate understanding of Racine's use of suicides is possible only when we analyze the particular suicides of the various plays in terms of the inner construction of Racine's tragedies and in terms of the interaction in Racine's thought of Greco-Roman and Christian factors.

There is a measure of incongruity in seeing the translation of A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Jerome Lobo at the head of the lists of the works of Samuel Johnson, who seems of all writers the one least likely to be swept away by the glamor of the orient. His casting his own philosophical reflections in the form of an oriental tale in Rasselas is less remarkable since in doing so he was following a convention of which the actual representation of oriental life formed no part. He could very well have written Rasselas without having any particular interest in the East, for in spite of Boswell's enthusiastic claim that “this Tale, with all the charms of oriental imagery, and all the force and beauty of which the English language is capable, leads us through the most important scenes of human life,” it is a commonplace of criticism that the scenes of human life displayed are not really linked to the scene of Abyssinia and that the Cairo of Rasselas is as actually London as the sage of the story is Johnson himself. The reader who goes to Rasselas seeking “the charms of oriental imagery” is doomed to disappointment. Yet the feeling persists that the spell which was cast on the mind of the youthful Johnson by the Abyssinia of Lobo must have reasserted itself when the mature man came to set down his somber reflections on human life at the time of his mother's death. W. P. Courtney and D. Nichol Smith, discussing the composition of Rasselas, comment that “very little of the Oriental life of Lobo is reproduced in Rasselas, though that narrative, as his first labour in literature, must have been embedded in the author's mind.” The mystery of Johnson's being attracted to the work of Lobo in the first place and of its relation, tentatively suggested by Courtney and Smith, to his own oriental tale is resolved by an examination of A Voyage to Abyssinia and its accompanying dissertations.

The erudite and industrious Georg Rollenhagen is usually remembered only as author of the Froschmeuseler. Among the authors of the sixteenth century who are accorded at least a paragraph or two in our modern histories of German literature probably none has been so much ignored or become so mistreated a step-child. Study of his life and works reveals a seeming jack-of-all-trades, but he was a master of many. He was a man who spent his life in the narrow limits of a region between Berlin and Magdeburg, yet he created a great school and, more than that, wrote vivid pictures of his time and a long poem, an animal verse-epic, that everybody read.

Die bemühungen des jungen Opitz um die metrische und sprachliche Erneuerung der deutschen Dichtung aus dem Geist der Renaissance sind zu wohl bekannt, um dariiber viel Worte zu verlieren. Mit dem Buck von der Deutschen Poeterey und den beiden Poemata-Sammlungen waren allerdings nur die zwei ersten, wenn auch wichtigsten Schritte auf dem Wege dichterischer Reform getan. Opitz hatte seine Theorien, die natürlich weder ganz original waren, noch es sein konnten, zuerst 1617 im Aristarchus ausgesprochen, sie dann im Buck von der Deutschen Poeterey 1624 ausgebaut. Die wichtige erste Anwendung auf die Lyrik legte er in Buchform schon 1624, bzw. 1625, dem Publikum vor. Zum allergrößten Teil enthielten dièse Sammlungen Übersetzungen aus dem Holländischen, Französischen, Italienischen, aus dem Lateinischen und Griechischen. Trotzdem war genug Eigenes vorhanden, um den in dieser Hinsicht nicht verwöhnten Zeitgenossen zu beweisen, daß ursprüngliche Lyrik in deutscher Sprache und in den neuern Versmaßen sehr wohl möglich sei.

Since Bacon was the first Englishman to mention “real characters” and among the first to insist on the need for a truly precise means of expression, scholarship has come to regard the outcropping of linguistic schemes in the seventeenth century as a direct result of his writings. The influence of his “semantic sense” on later thinkers has been traced with some care; Richard F. Jones and others have shown us how to connect the language projects with specific passages in his works; evidence of his influence has been seen in the support given in scientific circles to projects like John Wilkins' Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, which the Royal Society published in 1668.

Studies which have been made in the West of this important topic of international literary relations have been either very general or biased or both. It is indicative of the Stand der Forschung that M. Gorlin's sketchy article, “Goethe in Russland,” remains to this day one of the sources most frequently referred to. The most recent contribution to our topic is Mathew Volm's study W. A. Zhukovskii als Übersetzer (Part ii). It is a most detailed evaluation and analysis of Zhukovski's translations of Goethe. Unfortunately, however, Volm has chosen to make of his work a polemic against Gorlin's views; he maintains that Zhukovski not only was equal to his task as a translator of Goethe but in his renderings actually proved himself a greater poet. It cannot be said that this approach resulted in an acceptable contribution to our topic. Moreover, Volm's work, like Gorlin's, is completely lacking in factual, biographical material and argues its thesis in a historical vacuum.

When Thoughts and prejudices become stereotyped, they seek the fixed expression and convenient reference of a visual symbol. The Renaissance, with its Christian, classic, and neo-Platonic imageries, afforded an excellent demonstration of this. During that period, which enlarged consciously and unconsciously the implications of ut pictura poesis, this imagery could be examined in either the poetry or the painting. Nowhere does one find, however, a more harmonious marriage of artistic and literary metaphor than in the innumerable and popular emblem books of the Renaissance, depositories, as Henri Stegemeier writes, of so many traditions, themes, and opinions both belletristic and bellartistic. These emblemata were the perpetuating vehicles by which neoclassic metaphor was brought to the thousands of Europeans whose only contact with the painting of their time was an occasional glance at the religious figures over the candlelight of their local basilica and whose contact with literature was the sporadic reading of racy novelle or those antecedents of the novels which the Renaissance lumped under the term of “heroic poem.” Everyone read the emblem books, or looked at them, and there were more editions of Alciati in the sixteenth century than there were of Rabelais.