In determining more narrowly the date of A Session of the Poets, commonly ascribed to John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, c. 1676, the dating of the play Wits Led by the Nose has proved to be of preliminary concern, since it contains the first known reference to A Session. Wits Led has on the title-page verso “August 1677,” the date when it was licensed for printing, but there is no external evidence for the date of composition or of its acting at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. Falling back on internal evidence, we find this not explicit, but of a significance beyond the dating. The internal evidence for the acting date offers a clue to an unsettled question of identity: who made up the “younger part” of the King's or Duke's Company that acted in Lent, and what relation if any did these actors bear to the Nursery? The answer to this may provide another principle for determining the acting date of certain Restoration plays—the principle, namely, that a particular set of actor's names in a dramatis personæ may have a seasonal significance.

The life of Boswell’s Johnson, with its manifold successes, is largely decided by others—the interested volunteers who, governing singly or collectively, control most of his conversation, writing, charities, frolics, trips, meals, and encounters. Johnson is a character whom experience befalls and who (between interruptions) is lost in “languor and dejection.” He is aware that “external authority” is his prime mover. His operating unit is himself plus one (or more). This dependence on his associates bears on the pessimism of the protagonist Johnson and perhaps has implications as well for the author Johnson and for his own volumes. Boswell is most original, potent, and subtle in rendering the part that other characters perform in the making of his hero, showing their role to be an ultimately integrating and exalting force both in individual scenes and in Johnson’s career as a whole.

Whitman liked to picture himself as an innocent, primitive genius whose “barbaric yawp” was prompted by nature, not culture, and whose originality was ignorant of precedents and uncontaminated by book learning. But modern scholars and critics have shown that he and his art are not so simple as they pretend to be. They are products of a well-advanced artistic and literary development. My purpose is to examine one of his best poems, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” in relation to one of the oldest, most highly respected literary traditions in our civilization—that of pastoral elegy. Everyone knows that “Lilacs” is an elegy, and several writers have compared it in a general way to others, such as “Lycidas,” “Adonais,” and Emerson's “Threnody.” George Meyer of Newcomb College has pointed out the relation of “Lilacs” to pastoral elegy in class lectures, and doubtless others have noticed the same relation in various ways. But no one to my knowledge has made a systematic study of it.

[In the following paper, for reasons of brevity, a working hypothesis has been presented in narrative form: wherever a definite statement of historical fact has been made in support of a literary theory, the authority has been given in the footnotes. The article aims at elucidating certain problems in Love's Labour's Lost by correlating them with certain matters of historical fact which took place in and about the year 1591. The following points constitute problems in Love's Labour's Lost: (a) date of composition and first performance; (b) The unexpected dénoûment in the postponed marriages; (c) The choice of names for the leading male characters, Navarre, Berowne, etc.; (d) The curious emphasis laid upon the killing of the deer by the Princess; (e) The similarity of the Pageant scene at the close of the play to the Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe in The Midsummer Night's Dream; (f) The satire on Euphuism and Sonnets and other courtly affectations; (g) The unique observance by Shakespeare of the unities of time and place. The ensuing narrative has been evolved by applying to these problems the following matters of historical fact: (a) Burleigh's attempts, 1589–94, to force Southampton into marriage with his grand-daughter, Elizabeth de Vere, and Southampton's successful evasion of his betrothal; (b) Southampton's flight to France, 1591, to take part in the war in Normandy; (c) The Royal Progress, 1591, to Portsmouth and certain incidents in the entertainment of the Queen at Cowdray House.]

Recent teaching duties have obliged me to reread the bulk of Unamuno's published writings. In this rereading I have been struck by three or four clusters of images that recur with what seems like obsessive frequency. The purpose of this essay is to exhibit these images and to attempt to discover what function they fulfill in Unamuno's writing.

Although Nicholas Grimald has been mentioned as a forerunner of English classicism, his use of the closed and balanced decasyllabic couplet has not been emphasized sufficiently to challenge the position commonly assigned to Beaumont, Sandys, Waller, or Jonson. I shall attempt to point out his neoclassic qualities, and to account for them in terms of his sources. In so doing I hope to throw light upon the early history of the heroic couplet, Grimald's position as a pioneer, and the relation of the Latin elegiac distich to English classical verse.

An interest in Whitman's sources is to be expected, partly because of Whitman's secretiveness. The extent of his indebtedness to Emerson continues to be a problem. That this influence was felt before the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 is questioned, since Walt himself and his earliest biographers say that he had not read Emerson before publishing the first edition of the Leaves. Thus, in his Notes on Walt Whitman, John Burroughs writes: “Up to the time he published the quarto edition [the 1855 edition] he had never read the Essays or Poems of Mr. Emerson at all. This is positively true. In the summer following that publication he first became acquainted with the Essays.” Whitman's friend, W. D. O'Connor, says that Walt had read Kant, Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel, and that any fancied indebtedness to Emerson “is referable to the German source both had drunk from.” Though I believe that Whitman had read more of Emerson before 1855 than he would admit or would allow his friends to admit, I believe, too, that much of the resemblance between the writings of Emerson and Whitman, with reference especially to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, may be due to their “having drunk from the same source,” that source being Carlyle.

The opinions in regard to certain problems of poetic diction expressed by sixteen English critics during the period extending from the time of the first writings of the Imagists to the start of World War II are the material of this survey. During this period a large number of problems were recognized. This study excludes those that must be solved through a consideration of meter, rime, and sound effects in general, and concentrates on those involving aspects of words that are peculiar to words. A “vertical” examination having been made of the discussions of these problems in the writings of each critic, a “horizontal” summary may now be offered.

Some fifteen months have passed since I last reported directly to you on the progress of the Foreign Language Program at our unseasonable September meeting in Wisconsin. At that time I had been Director of the FL Program just one month, after five years as a staff member. Today I report again, although extraordinary circumstances have persuaded me to vacate the directorship, temporarily at least. I am called upon for an evaluation of the FL Program from its inception in 1952 to the present. Lest you think a post-mortem is implied, I hasten to state emphatically that the FL Program is a continuing and organic function of the MLA, indeed, of the entire profession of teachers of modern foreign languages, and, I venture to add, of all elements in American society with an interest in strengthening education.

Keats's second ode to Fanny Brawne, the important poem (biographically considered) beginning “What can I do to drive away Remembrance from my eyes,” contains a striking passage which has never been correctly interpreted. The poem as a whole shows Keats in an agitated state of mind. He is so enslaved by his thoughts of Fanny Brawne, he says, that he can neither regain his “old liberty” nor “mount” in his verse “above The reach of fluttering Love.” At this point he writes:

More dismal cares
Seize on me unawares,—
Where shall I learn to get my peace again?
To banish thoughts of that most hateful land,
Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand
Where they were wreck'd and live a wrecked life;
That monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour,
Ever from their sordid urns unto the shore,
Unown'd of any weedy-haired gods;
Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods,
Iced in the great lakes, to afflict mankind;
Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind,
Would fright a Dryad; whose harsh herbaged meads
Make lean and lank the starv'd ox while he feeds;
There bad flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song,
And great unerring Nature once seems wrong.

In Romania LXXVII (1956), 66 ff. Irénée Cluzel has re-edited three of the Catalan troubadour's poems composed in a more popular vein. It is with the second of them (No. 3 of M. de Riquer's edition, Barcelona, 1947) that we are going to deal here.

Uneasy with the forms of literary expression and its costs, the speakers of Herbert’s poems frequently bear disturbed relationships to their own accounts. An interesting version of the disturbance between storyteller and story occurs in “The Collar,” where present-tense speech is fenced off from, and framed by, the eroding influence of a retrospective narrative voice. The poem provides an occasion to study the motives for and virtues of storytelling, to examine the ways in which accounts are not only generated but preserved, and to explore those problems that arise when a fixed story must be reread and its boundaries changed. Because the speaker of “The Collar” both protects and dismantles his account, the poem also raises questions about the values we attach to narratives, the costs we are willing to support in order to maintain them, and the difficulties we undergo when stories fail to represent us in traditional ways.

The Shepheards Sirena, together with the Quest of Cynthia and the Nymphidia, was published in 1627. It is a conventional pastoral, in which is described the rueful condition of the shepherd Dorilus, who is pining over the separation from his beloved nymph, Sirena. While musing upon her absence, he reads a letter of Sirena's, in which she counsels him not to come to her, despite her sore affliction, because the ‘wilde waters’ which separate them would make it extremely hazardous. After reading the letter, Dorilus soliloquizes on his future course of action. While thus occupied, his fellow-shepherds gather round him and sing him one of the songs which he had once sent Sirena, when she lived near the Trent. Instead of driving his care away, the song makes him even more wretched, and he thereupon upbraids his companions for thus mocking his woe. At this juncture, a boisterous swain soundly reproves him for wasting his energies in lamenting the absence of his love, when the call of duty demands that he devote himself to more worthy pursuits. His companion reminds him that it is high time to withstand the inroads of the swineherds. In response to this stirring appeal, Dorilus joins his fellow-shepherds.

Four years ago I read before this Association a paper upon a single figure of speech,—allegory. In order to make a careful study of that figure, it was necessary to give some attention to other figures, especially to these three,—simile, metaphor, and personification. From time to time during the last four years I have followed up trains of thought that were opened by my earlier study, and thus have been led almost unconsciously to note the various relations of the more important figures, until I have come to feel that the best way to arrive at an understanding of any one figure is to study figurative language as a whole as well as in its parts.1 Each year the subject has been brought anew to my mind by the necessity of presenting it in the class-room.

The starting point of this paper is the following passage from the troubadour Guilhem Ademar's poem “De ben gran joia chantera” (P.-C. 202,5) recently published by Kurt Almqvist:

Mateo Alemán's Ortografía castellana ‘Castilian Orthography’ (Mexico City, 1609) is one of many little-studied Renaissance treatises on correct spelling. It offers a modest scheme for reforming the representation of spoken Spanish sounds in writing, argued with elaborate artifice and based especially on the claim that written letters communicate thanks to inherent Pythagorean harmonies. The treatise includes a full illustration of these reforms in an appendix called the “Problem,” which tells how two courtiers inconclusively debate whether speech or writing possesses “greater excellence.” By offering arguments composed entirely of topoi, establishing a rhetorical paradox, and employing devices of admiratio, the “Problem” achieves a fusion of “intersubjectivity” and “intertextuality” that identifies as a single reading experience the wonder of the paradox posed with the success of the improved spelling.

All critics of Thomas Deloney's novels have commented on the frequent passages in which, dropping his ordinary colloquial style, he indulges in euphuistic references to alleged wonders of natural history. His editor, Mr. F. O. Mann, explains many of the references by citing a probable source like Stephen Batman's Batman vppon Bartholome (1582) and highly improbable sources like Pliny, Sextus Empiricus, Cornelius Nepos, Belleforest, and the Nuremberg Chronicle. As I have recently shown, a large number of Deloney's “facts” about natural history and of his erudite-looking anecdotes were lifted directly from Thomas Fortescue's translation, The Forest or Collection of Historyes (1571, 1576). Many others (as well as a few that I supposed to have come from The Forest) were taken from Stephen Batman's The Doome warning all men to the Iudgemente (1581) and Thomas Johnson's Cornucopiæ, Or diuers secrets … Newlie drawen out of diuers Latine Authors into English (1595).

The myth of the cultural “limitations” of Henry James appears to have been the creation of two British journalists, Ford Madox Hueffer and Rebecca West, who, while they rendered to James the service of publicity, were not sufficiently read in either James or the classics to generalize as freely as they did on both his riches and his deficiencies. Hueffer led off in 1913 in this fashion: