It is not hard to see Alexander Pope's attitude toward the life of his times—and indirectly therefore toward the totality of life in general—couched in the neatly clipped, antithetically framed structure of his couplets, or Coleridge's sense of the harmony of the whole conveyed in the smooth flow of the Ancient Mariner. Critics have always sought in the framework of poetry some harmony with its theme and with the author's philosophy of life central to the theme. But belief in the relationship between views of life and prose style has had a more interrupted life history.

Defoe's The Fortunate Mistress (1724) has always had less popular appeal than Moll Flanders. To what extent this unpopularity is the result of the complexities in its theme cannot easily be determined. In a significant comment on this theme Roxana declares: “The opposite Circumstances of a Wife and Whore, are such, and so many, and I have since seen the Difference with such Eyes, as I could dwell upon the Subject a great-while, but my Business is History.” In a series of interrelated episodes the history itself presents sharply contrasted matrimonial circumstances. Both the character of Defoe's realism and his social vision are illuminated by an investigation of the pertinent backgrounds. In his last great novel he explored a subject increasingly important to a society middle-class in its moral and literary values. He drew materials for the dramatization of this matrimonial theme from his varied careers as journalist, moralist, and novelist.

After the initial intoxication, the Fall of Man is delineated in Paradise Lost largely in terms of the charges and counter-charges, the fear and hatred, the self-aggrandizement and the isolation of Adam and Eve. Only after Adam's most bitter denunciation of Eve is the direction changed with Eve's famous “Forsake me not thus, Adam … ”(x.914–936). Eve's speech is the turning point, for it is here that one of the guilty pair first attempts to take upon herself the burden of guilt, shows love and asks for love. The direction once taken, Adam is moved to similar affection, and the resulting reconciliation between man and woman is the inevitable prologue and type of the ensuing reconciliation between man and God.

A writer is moulded out of faults, and the greatest become much more the better for having had the courage to be a little bad. All writers experiment in some degree with technique, but not many, after their apprenticeship has been served, appear willing to desert the manner in which one achievement has been attained for another, untried, yet potentially permitting fuller and more complex expressiveness. Even less frequently does an established writer change the manner of expression midway in the work, destroying the unity of effect by radical alterations in technique while the work is in progress. In a novel or poem, at least, the new manner is not likely to emerge unexpectedly; a work written for publication can be withheld until its parts are integrated. A dramatist, however—especially one working in close conjunction with a voracious theatre—may not have such an opportunity. Deadlines render revisions luxuries and make beneficial experimentation a catch-as-catch-can matter. Under such circumstances, discoveries that cannot be ignored are likely to be dangerous to both the art and the commerce of the theatre.

A solution to the mystery of Pearl must meet certain tests if it is to answer the questions: What is typified by the jewel and the jewel-maiden, and how are they related? What is the symbolic import of the story? Specifically, as J. P. Oakden has indicated, the gem must stand for something which the poet could represent as a pearl and at the same time as a maiden who had died in infancy and had been redeemed by Christ. Further, says Oakden, it must signify something that the poet (or his protagonist speaking in the first person) “lost, mourned, and could recover through the grace of God, strengthened by partaking of the Blessed Sacrament.”

Since 1921, professors hanford, mohl, and others have told us much about the chronology and scope of Milton's reading in history and related subjects; but as yet we lack similarly detailed information regarding the time and nature of Milton's private studies in Greek and Roman literature. For at least a partial knowledge, however, of when and how Milton studied the Classics, source materials exist in annotations found in four of Milton's Greek texts: his Pindar, purchased in 1629, his Aratus, purchased in 1631, and his Lycophron and Euripides, both purchased in 1634. Here—and for the most part in his own hand—Milton has left us evidence of some of his Classical studies during his latter years at Cambridge and his later life; and an analysis of these annotations should supply us with information regarding Milton's intellectual history that we have hitherto lacked.

It is generally known that despite Petrarch's widespread reputation in his own day as a man of letters and scholar, his opinion of Dante as a poet was at variance with the literary fortune enjoyed by Dante in subsequent centuries. Many attempts have been made, especially around the turn of the century, to explain why Petrarch failed to perceive Dante's true genius as it appears in the Divine Comedy. For the most part, these explanations fall into one of three categories. Some ascribe Petrarch's attitude toward Dante to his aversion for the vernacular; others to envy; while still others to an inattentive reading or misunderstanding of the Divine Comedy.

Three distinct but often interwoven topics—a commentary on the doctrinal import of the Apostles' Creed, a relation of the circumstances of its actual formulation, and a narration of the subsequent careers of the Apostles—constituted themes of pleasure and curiosity to the medieval hagiographer and poet. Surviving Old English texts illustrate the first and third topics clearly: the Fata Apostolorum in the Vercelli Book (fol. 52v–53r), and the Credo in Deum Omnipotentem in Bodley MS. Junius 121 (fol. 46r–47r). An early Middle English text in British Museum MS. Nero A.xiv (fol. 131v) preserves uniquely a truncated version of the Creed. While it would be impossible to state with any certainty the approximate date when these traditions reached England from the Continent, we may safely assume that they were well established in the vernacular as well as in Church Latin from early Christian times.

There is no doubt that the Middle English romance Sir Degaré (hereafter abbreviated SD) enjoyed an early success; four manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, two later manuscripts, and three sixteenth-century prints survive.1 Modern criticism of it, however, shows striking contrast. Introducing the version in Bishop Percy's Folio MS., Hales wrote: “The romance is, in our opinion, of more than ordinary merit. It possesses the singular charm of brevity and conciseness; does not impair or destroy its power by the endless diffuseness and prolixity which are the besetting disfigurements of that branch of literature to which it belongs.”2 J. E. Wells agrees: “The materials are wrought into a coherent whole without digression or unnecessary explanation… . All in all, the poem deserves the popularity that its repeated reprinting in the sixteenth century indicates it to have enjoyed” (p. 135).

A few years ago Roy W. Battenhouse published what is perhaps the most original and provoking theory of the nature of the ghost in Hamlet since the article by W. W. Greg which, with its contention that the apparition is to be understood as wholly subjective, prompted J. D. Wilson's study of Elizabethan spirit-lore. Battenhouse argues in essence that the ghost shows far too much vindictiveness (in the cellarage too much artfulness) to be a saved soul. It must therefore, he thinks, be out of some paganesque purgatory rather than the Catholic one, as Wilson had confidently asserted. Whether or not Battenhouse may be thought“ to have made his point, he has certainly raised some real difficulties for those who would regard the ghost as Catholic.

When the author of Beowulf undertook to create in English a secular narrative poem of epic amplitude, he set himself to a task for which there was no precedent in the native tradition. In the Germanic past, narrative poetry had been confined to the heroic lay. This was a short poem, not exceeding some two hundred long-lines. It held to a single action, the sequence of which it presented with abrupt economy. Preoccupied with the scenic and the climactic, it had little leisure for any element which might retard the pace or attenuate the impact. To this tradition, the digressive, the repetitious, and the dilatory were alien. Only in style was the static indulged, in variation, in the ornamental and the vicarious epithet, and here only with restraint.

In their ingratitude toward their predecessors, Ronsard and Du Bellay did not hesitate to ridicule unfairly the achievements of the French poets of earlier generations, even in the act of despoiling them of some of their finest treasures. This is amply illustrated in the remarkable assertion of Claude Binet, the first biographer of Ronsard, who describes the adolescent poet as “ayant tousjours en main quelque Poëte Franĉois … et principalement, comme luy mesmes m'a maintesfois raconté, un Jean Lemaire de Belges … et un Clement Marot, lesquels il a depuis appelé [sic] … les immondices, dont il tiroit de belles limures d'or.” Nevertheless, the influence of Lemaire's “rubbish” is plainly visible in Ronsard's writing from the beginning of his career, particularly in the numerous passages in which he anticipates the Franciade, as well as in the epic itself. “Ronsard, enthousiasmé par la lecture du principal ouvrage de J. Lemaire de Belges, les Illustrations de Gaule, avait jeté son dévolu sur un … sujet, qu'il croyait essentiellement national, mais qui n'était qu'une légende, inventée au VIIe siècle …” (Laum., XVI, In trod. pp. v-vi). This was the legend of the descent of the French from Francus-Astyanax, son of Hector, the Trojan hero of the Iliad.

This is a proposal to consider the periods of English poetic history on the basis of characteristic modes of sentence structure and on the pattern of their sequence.