About one hundred inmates are seated in the prison gym, waiting for the performance of king lear to begin. Then Jamal, as Edmund, steps out from behind the makeshift set and paces across the stage, his sharply trimmed goatee pointing outward like an accusing finger, his burning gaze fixed on the audience. He raps: “Secret fears are brought to life on stage. / My life is in a rage, and to write my life / One page is not enough. / But if I had one mike I might be able to / Escape this cage … bring Shakespeare to life through my high beams.” Appropriating Cordelia's words, he declares that “I am not the first who have incurred the worst / But I have concurred with those who oppose my life's worth. …” He continues:

They label me violent because I stay bottled up and silent
And although my life is like a raging sea
My heart sings … no life is quiet.
Stop complaining, you say, but I can't because
I'm trapped on the stage of life's lies.
And I ask you
Why brand they us with base? With baseness?
Bastardy? Base? Base?

Marianne Moore's response to World War II took an unexpected form: her translation, published in 1954, of the fables of La Fontaine. While Moore's project emerged from a wartime effort of European cultural transmission, the fables' indirect speech also served more personal political ends. It afforded a protected means for entering a gendered debate about war and a language for writing about large issues—violence, suffering, injustice—that avoided the oversimplifications and divisiveness of wartime and Cold War rhetoric. Critics have mostly neglected Moore's Fables along with her politics, but both are essential to understanding not only her response to war but also the larger goals of postwar American poetry and translation as a political project—one that allowed Moore and her peers to offset the guilt of spectatorship by reclaiming intellectual labor as a mode of war participation.

More than just an innovative early-twentieth-century play or the product of an avantgarde movement, Wyndham Lewis's Enemy of the Stars assails conventional notions of art without rationalizing its attack through an appeal to an explicit aesthetic or social program. Lewis is not so much establishing an aesthetic position as playing with the idea of aesthetic positioning. An examination of the shifting stances taken in the play highlights some of the most important sources of formal and thematic turbulence exploited by the nonprogrammatic avant-garde and exposes the means by which this turbulence is contained. The mimetic world of the drama is at first undercut by the visual enticements of the page and by references to the social institution of art; then the drama is hybridized with narrative representational techniques and overlaid with shifting allegorical implications. Ultimately, these aesthetic contortions turn the text into a performance staged on the pages of the magazine Blast.

To flourish, scholarship must have at hand in copious supply the recorded materials which advance its studies. The history of scholarship is consequently in large measure a history of the diffusion of the materials for scholarly research.

The invention of printing is of course the event which most dramatically accelerated this diffusion. But in our own day microphotography has had an effect of comparable importance. Because of microfilm and the related microphotographic processes any scholar or scholarly community may now have at hand at moderate expense what was previously reserved to a few, or—even more significant—what until recently was not conveniently accessible to any scholar no matter how great his independent means nor how ancient and rich his institution. Unpublished manuscripts scattered in dozens of repositories; printed works long out of print, unprocurable and dispersed; other sources so impermanent that deterioration erases them within a generation—for all of these microphotography has provided a means of diffusion for scholarly purposes where even printing has failed, and which is in some respects even superior to printing.

Theoretically it is true that the application of the genealogical method to a sizable number of manuscripts descended from a single archetype would allow the almost perfect reconstruction of that archetype. Families, groups, and subgroups could be distinguished without hesitation, and readings could be determined with very little recourse to editorial ingenuity. Unfortunately such conditions are not to be found in actual practice. When the text critic has made a systematic record of all variants to be found in the MSS that he has collated, he must determine which of the great quantity of variational groups are genetic—that is, which groups actually reflect in their common readings the genealogy of their transmission. This operation requires the elimination of variational groups formed by the mere possession of the right reading, and random groupings formed by the accidental coincidence of readings.

It is difficult for me to express in so many words what I feel as I am standing here before this august body of scholars and teachers to address you as your president—in this particular year 1961. It is not only the honor as such that is crushing, an honor which in all humility I accepted for the greater glory of my beloved University rather than as a nod to my own modest talents. No, what is really crushing is to be called upon to address you at this particular juncture of world events, described in the words of President Kennedy as “the most dangerous time in the history of the human race,” in the eery light of the fact that “the events and decisions of the next ten months may well decide the fate of man for the next 10,000 years.” Even one year ago, nobody would have prognosticated in such terms. The German problem, the causa movens of it all, has been with us, and with this society of American humanists, for quite some time. In 1917, it was the noble lot of Kuno Francke to strike the balance of cultural values, and, in 1941, John Walz had a similar task, of incomparably greater magnitude. In 1957, when by H. Carrington Lancaster's presidential forecast of 1939, a third World War might have been upon us, Taylor Starck held this high office. Well, the year 1957 was remarkable enough, setting a milestone also in our affairs in the advent of Sputnik I. But at least we were spared the apocalyptic visions of a thermo-nuclear Armageddon with which we have become but too familiar in this, the year of the Lord 1961.

In a recent issue of the University of Texas Bulletin, D. T. Starnes has contributed a long-needed and most useful survey of early English lexicography and has clearly outlined the many aspects of this complicated subject. It is my purpose here to offer a few notes and comments.

It was probably during, or shortly after, his residence at Cambridge University that Edmund Spenser composed two ‘hymnes,’ or odes, in praise of love and beauty. The ‘love’ praised was ‘platonic love’; the ‘beauty’ praised was ‘intellectual’ beauty.

These two poems were written, it seems certain, before 1580. Over twenty years later, perhaps twenty-five,–at any rate not long before 1596,–the poet, grown older, professes to condemn them as conspicuous among “the many lewd layes” that “in the greener times of his youth” he had made

The studies of Melville's poetry have been singularly few. Certainly we could rightfully have expected more in the light of contemporary interest in his prose, and few critics would have been more likely to encourage others to further and fuller studies than those who have discussed these poems in print.

Few poems in French literature are better known than L'Art by Gautier and the Art poétique of Verlaine. But the fame of these poems obscures a fact to be discovered by wider reading; namely, that nine or ten living French poets have each published an Art poétique since the opening of the twentieth century. The following pages are a presentation of these modern French poems on poetry which have been brought together in the belief that they may reveal the literary fortunes of Gautier, Verlaine, and their peers, or indicate their significance to living poets.

This collection of essays has threaded several lines of argument through and around the topic of autoexoticism. With Minyan Sun we saw how an exoticizing gaze can develop the feedback loop of autoexoticism when the self recognizes its investment in the other and subjects itself to its own desiring attention. Daniele Nunziata and Naomi Charlotte Fukuzawa both traced further complexities of identity that cross the self-other boundary in colonial Cyprus and between Britain and Japan. Peter Hill, Kasia Szymanska, and Valentina Gosetti all explored the tactical potential of autoexotic elements in a politics of representation, in locations as diverse as Syria, Poland, and Flanders. With Adriana Jacobs we found autoexoticism in recent Hebrew poetry to be a “transcreative and relational” imaginative practice. Finally, Xiaofan Amy Li argued that autoexoticism opens “the boundaries of one's subjectivity and culture to change and rupture,” creating “a holistic field of intercultural experience” where “what is considered self and other are transient and plastic,” since they are drawn into an intercultural practice that “consciously selects and re-creates elements and aspects from disparate cultures and identities.” As these accounts reveal, there can be much that is attractive in autoexoticist styles of being, of self-representation, and of encounter. They are formally and linguistically mobile. They have a strong affective charge, provoking reactions of amusement, embarrassment, or outrage. They are courageous, since they run the risk of being dismissed as mere exoticism. And they can loosen established identities, opening them to change.

Two of the dominant motives in pastoral literature are the “come-live-with-me” theme, which offers to the loved one as inducements gifts generally of a pastoral nature, and the ideal of the “golden age,” which is based upon a personal desire for a patterned idyllic life. The former has been carefully traced by R. S. Forsythe, but the latter has lain neglected in spite of the fact that two of the best known lyrics in the language, Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, utilize this theme. It is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate that the description of the ideal day is a significant and deeply rooted theme which developed gradually during the whole course of the pastoral tradition. Milton's two days derive from this evolution rather than from a few scattered lyrics which immediately preceded his work, as is generally stated.

Of all the romantic poets Keats was the most “literary,” in the sense that almost all his work bears the direct impress of his really wide reading. With such a poet, of course, the process of borrowing, whether conscious or unconscious, means a process of transmutation also; hence the special fascination, and endlessness, of the study of Keats's sources. The following notes do not contribute to the interpretation of the poems, but they may add a little to our knowledge of the materials that were floating in his mind.

After the death of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1834, while Hazlitt, DeQuincey, Cottle, and Allsop were publishing unwise and sometimes unfounded accounts of his life, Henry Nelson Coleridge, the poet's nephew and Sara Coleridge's husband, thought that some effort should be made to prepare an authentic biography. His additions to the Biographia Literaria and his Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge show how well he succeeded.

The words beautiful, pathetic, sublime, and their synonyms appear often in Samuel Johnson's discussions of literary pleasure. Although I do not know that all three are ever used together in one sentence, the sublime and the pathetic, on the one hand, and the sublime and the beautiful, on the other, are among Johnson's most frequently recurring doublets. Each word becomes an important term of aesthetic meaning, clearly distinguished from the others; each expands under the pressure of contemporary theory; each is complicated and enriched by the vigorous personality of its user; and each is used as a tool of practical criticism to help account for the distinguishing excellence of a great English poet. For Johnson, Pope exemplified the beautiful, Shakespeare the pathetic, and Milton the sublime.