The Marathon race was undoubtedly a happy thought on the part of the promoters of the first Olympic games of modern times—those held at Athens in 1896. A well-known member of the French Academy, M. Michel Bréal, gave the prize, and the Greeks set their hearts on winning it. A private correspondent wrote from Athens just before the race took place:—

This curious product of mediævalism, translated from some Latin treatise by an unknown hand in the latter half of the fifteenth century, carries symbolism to its last stage. It is interesting as showing how the preachers in the abbeys and cathedrals of England found, on occasion, “sermons in stones.” It would seem as if Longfellow must have read this poem; for a part of his Golden Legend, the close of Friar Cuthbert's sermon, is an accurate reproduction of the spirit of this piece.

The centenary of the death of Arthur Hallam, noted in England by a leading article in The Times Literary Supplement (September 14, 1933) and in America by an exhibition of Hallam's works in the Yale University Library (January, 1934), served as a reminder not so much of what we know of the youth who was so important an influence on Tennyson as of what we do not know fully, a partial ignorance which results from the difficulty with which the study of Hallam is attended. The “lost” poem here reprinted after more than a century is lost only in the sense in which nearly half the printed poems of Hallam are unknown because they are missing from the editions commonly available. When Hallam died in 1833 in his twenty-third year, he left behind him one small and now very scarce volume, privately printed in 1830, and other poems and essays, some of which were collected by his father, Henry Hallam the historian, and privately issued as the Remains of 1834. Most of this material, also edited by Henry Hallam, was privately printed in 1853, and this volume is the basis of such subsequent collections of Arthur Hallam's work as have appeared.

1. In order to place our subject in a proper setting, let us note what moods were distinguished by representative grammarians of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The table below reproduces their terminology:

No better “optical symbol” can be found for one aspect of Henry James than the photograph taken in 1906 showing him in top hat, cane and gloves in hand, bending slightly forward in the classic Daumier pose, taking in impressions of a painting. This is a portrait, however, not merely of the occasional James— the art critic, friend and befriender of painters, biographer of a sculptor—but also of the essential James—the master of the art of fiction. That his love of pictures and familiarity with the studio world were grist to his mill is evident in stories and novels such as “The Madonna of the Future” and The Tragic Muse in which his depiction of the artist and exploration of aesthetic questions are thematically central. Reflecting his experience of art less obviously but more significantly are the pictorial effects and art allusions permeating his fiction, both early and late. For though James was first and foremost a literary artist preoccupied with the problems of his own craft, his responsiveness to the visual arts was so keen, was so much an integral part of his consciousness, that it inevitably made itself felt in his literary technique. Clearly, a study of the pictorial aspects of his fiction is justified for the light it may cast on his method as well as on individual works.

Mm. edmond et Jules de Goncourt ont inventé trois choses, ils le disent du moins: le naturalisme, la vogue du XVIIIe siècle, et le japonisme. Pour nous en tenir à la littérature, ils se flattent un peu; cependant Germinie Lacerteux est de 1865, et suivait Renée Mauperin, qui est de 1864.

With these words Professor Lanson began the section of his Histoire de la littérature française devoted to the Goncourt brothers. It would be permissible in a manual intended for the man in the street to halt at this point in order to discuss the Goncourt claims to have founded Naturalism without investigating the vogue of the eighteenth century and of things Japanese in literature. Here, however, it is proposed to go a little farther, to investigate first the Goncourt claims to be the first French artists to appreciate the work of the Japanese, and secondly to call attention to a kind of literary “Japonisme,” concerning which Professor Lanson is silent.

Much has been written about Stein's politics ever since it was revealed, in 1996, that Stein had translated many of Philippe Pétain's speeches (Burns and Dydo, “Gertrude Stein”; Van Dusen). If some critics accuse Stein of collaboration with Vichy France, others defend her by pointing out contradictory evidence regarding her behavior during the war years. Barbara Will, in Unlikely Collaboration; Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay, and the Vichy Dilemma (2011), casts Stein in the role of pro-Vichy thinker whose support of Pétain was “heartfelt and dogged” (118). In addition to translating Pétain's speeches, Stein was a close friend of Bernard Fay, who, as head of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, was an official high up in the administration of Vichy France. Charles Bernstein, Edward Burns, and Joan Retallack take up Stein's defense in jacket2's online dossier Gertrude Stein's War Years; Setting the Record Straight (2012). They argue that no conclusive evidence ties Stein explicitly to Vichy France (Burns) and highlight the irony in some of her statements—for instance, that Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace Prize (Bernstein, “Gertrude Stein”; Retallack). Furthermore, Stein published her writing in both the Vichy-sponsored magazine Patrie (“Fatherland”) and the anti-Nazi and anti-Vichy journals Confluences, Fontaine (“Fountain”), and L'arbalète (“The Cross-Bow”) during the war years (Burns and Dydo, “Three Lives”; Burns). She sympathizes with the French maquis in her postwar memoir Wars I Have Seen and writes about the inner workings of the Resistance in her play In Savoy; or, Yes Is for a Very Young Man (Wagner-Martin).

In 1943 Friedrich Beissner published the first volume of his critical edition of Hölderlin's works. This, together with the appearance of succeeding volumes, has reawakened interest in the problems that the poet's verse raises. Basic articles on text critical methodology and numerous reviews of the Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe have taken positions with regard to Wilhelm Hoffmann's claim that Beissner's edition represents “einen gereinigten, endgültigen und vollständigen Hölderlin-Text ..., den es bisher nicht gibt.” In this critical literature, now distributed over a round two decades, three main positions may be distinguished:—

(1) Enthusiastic and largely uncritical approbation has come from writers who have eagerly awaited the appearance of further volumes of the edition. These writers are in basic agreement with Hoffmann's above-cited claim. Emil Staiger describes the edition as “das größte philologische Meisterwerk, das die deutsche Literaturwissenschaft bis zum heutigen Tag zu verzeichnen hat, epochemachend in dem neuartigen Aufbau des kritischen Apparates, ... ” It is, according to Ernst Müller, a document of Beissner's ability to decipher “arg verdorbene, oftmals überschriebene und in scheinbar willkürlich zerstreutem Zustand vorhandene Manuskripte mit dem geschulten Auge des Philologen auf ihren Wort- und Silbenbestand hin. ... ” Manfred Windfuhr classifies Beissner's work as “der erste gelungene Versuch, das Werden der Dichtung Stufe um Stufe fortschreitend aufzuhellen, den Linien der Entstehung anschaulich zu folgen.” Lothar Kempter sees the justification of Beissner's edition as against the editions of Hellingrath and Zinkernagel first of all in the relative completeness of Beissner's contribution: “Jede Auswahl, nicht nur des endgültigen Wortlautes, sondern auch der Vorstufen, bevormundet den Betrachter. Einzig die in jeder Hinsicht vollständige Ausgabe schenkt ihm die Freiheit der eigenen Entscheidung.”

The first series of Essays in Criticism was one of four works growing directly out of the lectures which Matthew Arnold delivered at Oxford between 1857 and 1867. The so-called “inaugural series,” on the “modern element” in literature, survives only in fragments—one whole lecture and part of another. A second series, on the translation of Homer, was begun even before the first was completed, and the lectures on Celtic literature wound up Arnold's professorship, except for the valedictory “Culture and Its Enemies.” Crowded into the interstices of this ambitious program were the pieces which were to make up the bulk of the Essays in Criticism of 1865.

I was invited by the MLA committee on the status of graduate students in the profession to speak at a convention workshop entitled “Keywords for a Digital Profession.” My keyword was obsolescence, a catchall term for a multiplicity of conditions; there are material obsolescences, institutional obsolescences, and purely theoretical obsolescences, each type demanding a different response. I spent years pondering theoretical obsolescence while writing The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. The book argues, in part, that claims about the obsolescence of cultural forms often say more about those doing the claiming than they do about the objects of the claims. Neither the novel in particular nor the book more broadly nor print in general is dead, and agonized announcements of the death of such technologies and genres often serve to re-create an elite cadre of cultural producers and consumers, ostensibly operating on the margins of contemporary culture and profiting from their claims of marginality by creating a sense that their own values, once mainstream and now decaying, must be protected. Two oft-cited reports of the National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk (2004) and To Read or Not to Read (2007), come to mind; like numerous other expressions of anxiety about the supposed decline of reading, each rhetorically creates a cultural wildlife preserve in which the apparently obsolete can flourish (United States). These texts suggest that obsolescence is, in this case at least, less a material state than a political project.

The clashing and contradictory responses created by a pathetic tale such as Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale are best explained by the opposition of tragic (and therefore involving) elements found in the narrative events and comic elements found in the distancing style, in the faintly comic story, and above all in the happy Christian ending. Man of Law's Tale is not a Shakespearean tragedy but what may be called a tragedy of victimization, prototypes of which may be found in the Saint's life and in late classical romance. This opposition between emotional involvement and distancing is manifested in various ways, not the least of which is the metrical form of Man of Law's Tale. All this fits in well with what might be called the contempt of the world tradition which advocates a distancing from this world for the sake of an ultimate happy ending in heaven. It is no accident that a major source for Man of Law's Tale is Innocent III's De contemptu mundi.

When Keats in a letter calls this world “The vale of Soul-making,” he comes close to Wordsworth's way of thinking. For Keats says that we come into the world as pure potentiality or “Intelligence” and that we acquire a “Soul” or “sense of Identity” through “Circumstances.” And it is the main purport of Wordsworth's poetry to show the spiritual significance of this world, to show that we evolve a soul or identity through experience and that the very process of evolution is what we mean by soul.

GEORG Trakl, Georg Heym, and Ernst Stadler are generally grouped together as the early German Expressionists. Each was born within a four-year period, 1883–87, and each died in the two-year period, 1912–14. The three poets produced a great deal of bad poetry before breaking through to both originality and modernity for a few short years before early deaths. Their poetry provided some of the models for the immense following wave of Expressionist lyric and at the same time represents the greatest and most lasting achievement of that movement. They shared many techniques, such as the new kinds of metaphor (described by Schneider)1 or the new kind of lyrical sentence-line (Zeilenstil described by Heselhaus).2

The Apologia pro Vita Sua is not the autobiography of Newman from 1801 to 1845. It tells us nothing of the family life, the student activities, the intellectual and artistic interests of its complex subject. Nor is it even a spiritual autobiography of those years except in a limited sense. We must turn to the Letters and Correspondence, with their “Autobiographical Memoir”, to supplement the bare account given in the Apologia of Newman's conversion to Evangelical Christianity. The Apologia is primarily a work of rhetoric designed to persuade a body of readers or “judges”, English, Protestant, and suspicious of a convert to an unpopular religion, that Newman, whom Kingsley had made a symbol of the Catholic priesthood, was a man not of dishonesty but of integrity. Newman chose autobiography as his method because of his lifelong English preference of the concrete to the abstract, his vivid realization of the rôle in persuasion of personal influence: “I am touched by my five senses, by what my eyes behold and my ears hear. … I gain more from the life of our Lord in the Gospels than from a treatise de Deo.”1 “The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us/'sj^was his conversion to Catholicism after a long puzzling delay, many predictions of the event, and even) charges of treachery to the Church of England that had created th^ atmosphere of suspicion in which his character had been impugned! Therefore he would confine the autobiography principally to a brief explanation of how he arrived, to begin with, at what so many regarded with suspicion and fear: Anglo-Cathoiic principles; and to a detailed one of how, having accepted them and devoted himself to propagating them, he became convinced that the principles which had led him thus far must lead him farther still, into the Catholic Church. ”I am but giving a history of my opinions, and that, with the view of showing that I have come by them through intelligible processes of thought and honest external means“ (p. 27). If that history of opinions, in spite of its limited scope, has so much of the richness and variety of great autobiography, it is because Newman held that the means by which we arrive at belief, all of which he would try to chronicle for his own life so far as that was possible, were multiform and complex.

While other New York writers despaired of finding home in America's wasteland after World War i as War I, African American writers like Langston Hughes, Claude MacKay, Nella Larsen, and Rudolph Fisher created a powerful urban image of home in Harlem. Their Harlem home was at once place, community, and aspiration. As collectively articulated in their various writings, its vitality was most palpable, least constricted, in Harlem's well-peopled streets. It was evoked wherever—albeit only where—African Americans could come together. It was expressed by their art's profound yet deceptive masquerades. The Harlem Renaissance thus challenged America's established association of home with rural permanency. We ignore a fitting image of home for mobile, urban America when we fail to recognize these civic dimensions of Harlem Renaissance art—as Greater New York also failed to accept a public statue of James Weldon Johnson, memorialized by a literary archive at Yale instead.

Komm in den totgesagten park und schau:
Der schimmer ferner lachelnder gestade
Der reinen wolken unverhofites blau
Erhellt die weiher und die bunten pfade.

Dort nimm das tiefe gelb-das weiche grau
Von birken und von buchs-der wind ist lau-
Die spaten rosen welkten noch nicht ganz-
Erlese kiisse sie und flicht den kranz

Vergß auch diese lezten astern nicht-
Den purpur um die ranken wilder reben
Und auch was übrig blieb von griinem leben
Verwinde leicht im herbstlichen gesicht.

Einsamer nie als im August:
Erfüllungsstunde-im Gelande
die roten und die goldenen Brande,
doch wo ist deiner Garten Lust?

Die Seen hell, die Himmel weich,
die Acker rein und glanzen leise,
doch wo sind Sieg und Siegsbeweise
aus dem von dir vertretenen Reich?

Wo alles sich durch Gluck beweist
und tauscht den Blick und tauscht die Ringe
im Weingeruch, im Rausch der Dinge-:
dienst du dem Gegengliick, dem Geist.

In two public addresses, Gottfried Benn declared himself one of the many admirers of the famous poem by Stefan George which begins: “Komm in den totgesagten park und schau …” Upon both occasions Benn gave his audience a short resume of his reasons for liking the poem. These remarks, whatever they tell us about George, reveal something about Benn also, for the poet—as T. S. Eliot points out—is a very special kind of critic, inasmuch as he, when commenting on the work of another creator, consciously or unconsciously “is always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind that he wants to write.”