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 has been repeatedly pointed out that Shaftesbury derived many, if not the most, of his philosophical ideas from his immediate and more remote predecessors. Nevertheless, the recognition of this fact does not detract from the originality and power of Shaftesbury himself. The ideas gleaned from a wide reading and companionship passed through the medium of his keen and generous mind and emerged a new intellectual compound.

In seiner Auswahl aus den hochdeutschen Dichtern des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1820) hat Lachmann die methodische Textkritik deutscher Werke des Mittelalters begründet. Er forderte, von Benecke angeregt und durch textkritische Arbeit an klassischen Autoren geschult, daβ man zuerst auf Grund des gesamten erhaltenen Materials die echteste Überlieferung bestimme (recensio) und darauf dann eine systematische, nach dem Wert der einzelnen Handschriften abwägende Konjekturalkritik aufbaue (emendatio). Die sprachliche Form aber suchte er durch eingehende Reimstudien zu regeln,—doch war es bedenklich, daβ er sich dabei fast ausschlieβlich auf oberdeutsche, speziell alemannische Handschriften berief und auf eine möglichst altertümliche Rechtschreibung ausging.

In an article reviewing Werfel's collected poems from the Catholic point of view, Cornelius Schroeder, a Franciscan, maintains that despite constant references to God in his poetry Werfel does not experience any real religious faith. It is Schroeder's contention that Werfel does not succeed in finding a solution to the conflict between nature and spirituality which is so prominent in his poetry:

Als geistiger Mensch kommt er nicht hinweg iiber die Zwiespältigkeit von Natur und Geist, kommt er nicht los von der Qual, in welche die Geburt für die Erde den Geist gestiirzt hat.

The best parts of Robert Y. Turner's article “Dramatic Conventions in All's Well That Ends Well (PMLA, lxxv, Dec. 1960) concern the denouement of that play. He acutely points out that it is Bertram, with his agonies and perplexities, not Diana, who ”holds the center of the stage“ during her long series of paradoxes; he shows how Shakespeare has added details to his source which prolong and intensify Bertram's distress; and he relates this distress to that of other similar heroes as well as to that of earlier comic butts. I should like, however, to question a number of other points in this article and thereby to challenge as unproved what I take to be its main thesis: that in All's Well Shakespeare ”produced a comedy more of an age than for all time“ because he chose there to follow a contemporary vogue for ”prodigal son comedies“ whose conventions ”have lost their savor.“

In a familiar passage from a letter to W. S. Landor, Wordsworth exposed, as I see it, the central purpose of his art: “Even in poetry it it the imaginative only ... that which is conversant (with), or turns upon infinity, that powerfully affects me.” “Things,” he said, had to be lost in each other and limita to vanish; otherwise he was indifferent. The argument of this essay is intended to suggest an approach to Wordsworth at the poetic level of infinity. This is the realm of pure universals, the insight of poetry which reveals a state of being independent of sensuous limitations. In the sense of Hegel it is the level of reality, possessing a wholly independent being, as opposed to that of appearance, depending wholly in its existence upon the senses. The exact nature of reality remains, of course, a question for pure philosophy; and it is probable that the discipline of philosophy rather than that of literary criticism must judge finally the dialectic of poetry concerned with infinity. Yet the highest attainment of the fine arts is clearly an act of turning upon the infinite, an invocation in the observer or the listener of a sense of endlessness. Medium, form, and technique are the approaches to the ultimate experience inherent in a particular work. As artistic acts from the world of appearance, they may be analyzed and defined by the particular critical disciplines concerned with them. At the end of these functions lies the problem of philosophy. What is the nature of the wholly independent being which all great art attains? Wordsworth implies in his statement to Landor that awareness of the infinite is the final objective of poetry. My purpose is to investigate the method of Wordsworth's thought at the threshold of this objective rather than to define philosophically what the sense of infinity, in itself, contains. It seems clear that nothing more need be said upon the imaginative process as this is explored in Wordsworth's Prefaces or interpreted by his critics.

A consideration of “Bright Star” and “Ode to a Nightingale” prepares for a reading of Hyperion as a poem of revisionary strife. Keats intends a progress poem that will put Milton, and secondarily Wordsworth, behind him. Entering the threatening ancestral space of Miltonic epic, Keats endeavors to make it his own by correcting Milton's errors in vision and thereby subduing the phantom he raises. Milton, however, will not maintain his place in the past; he returns, uncannily, to subvert Keats as powerfully as Keats subverts him. The impotence and anxiety of the Miltonic Titans are expressive of Keats's failure to write the poem he wishes. His surrogate, Apollo, is waiting to dawn but cannot. Engulfed by a knowledge that is equivalent to the Miltonic legacy, Apollo and Keats are halted at the threshold, in the dark passage that Keats explores in the great odes and in The Fall of Hyperion.

T. S. Eliot's most recent play, The Confidential Clerk, received short shrift in New York after triumphs in Edinburgh andLondon.lt would be too much perhaps to say that the play was “snuffed out by the reviews,” but it certainly came up against as unsympathetic a row of reviewers as any great dramatist has had to face. A leading journalistic critic wrote that The Confidential Clerk “represents a deliberate attempt to be ordinary. Unfortunately, Eliot has succeeded.” When he indicated in a lecture at Harvard University several years ago that, like Shakespeare, he hoped gradually to reduce dramatic verse to the level of colloquial speech before attempting elaborate embroidery of it, Eliot could not have expected his words to fly back in his face in precisely this way. Mrs. Guzzard's ringing lines seem especially apropos here: “Wishes, when realized, sometimes turn / Against those who have made them.” At any rate the apparently simple language (some have called it “unpoetic”) and farcical plot devices of the new play seem to have turned aside extensive serious critical consideration. For a play that comes to grips so forcibly with such compelling issues as the spiritual loneliness and inarticulateness of modern men and women, freedom of the will and predestination, cultural integration, and the place of the arts in life, it has been curiously underrated. The Confidential Clerk, while closely linked with Eliot's previous plays, is in so many ways a new departure as to reward close study. As a matter of fact, much of its poignancy and plangency eludes one when the play is viewed for the first time merely as a stage piece. Probably no other play of Eliot's calls for such total immersion.

The purpose of this paper is to add another chapter to the constantly growing account of Melville as a writer who, in calculating his effects, often had recourse to travel diaries and guidebooks to furnish him with factual information and with dramatic episodes, which appear as the authentic experiences of his characters. In this instance the book is Redburn, the novel which he regarded as one of the least of his works, but which many besides John Masefield have admired as a spirited and sometimes harrowing narrative of a boy's running away to sea.

How postmodern is populism? Is there a hidden legacy of the 1968 manifestos in today's right-wing protest culture? In recent years, questions like these have often been posed in a more or less polemical manner. They should be reconsidered in a more sober, nuanced way. In academia, they are of far more than merely historical interest since unlike the hairstyles, clothing fashions, body culture, and living spaces from the late 1960s, many of the theories from that period are still regarded as contemporary. Above all, this applies to poststructuralism as a collective name for the impulses of what is often called French theory, which have set the tone in the humanities for two generations. However, the problem with the continuing topicality of poststructuralist and postmodern ways of thinking is that many of their elements are becoming virulent under completely changed political circumstances.

The Damned Crew was a class of roisterers in London from the early 1590's to the late 1620's, their self-styled captain being at one time Sir Edmund Baynham, who was also involved in the Gunpowder Plot. Represented in literature as perjurers, assassins, dissidents, and revellers, they were thought to be reprobate with the damned crew of devils in hell. Indeed, they may have thought so themselves, reacting from misconstrued predestinarianism as desperate libertines with a limited Manichean outlook. Some such interpretation explains their title and behaviour and the view of them taken by theological controversialists such as Dove, Kellison, and Sutcliffe, and by playwrights like Chapman.

Our knowledge of medieval and Renaissance theory of allegory is largely governed by two traditions, the rhetorical definition inherited from Quintilian and the exegetical method of reading on two or more levels of meaning, a method traceable to Augustine and usually illustrated by Dante's letter to Can Grande Della Scala. The rhetorical view of allegory as inversio and extended metaphor is mostly useful for examining the figure on a narrow scale, normally as part of a larger context. It describes an element of style but not a fictional structure. The exegetical tradition, though widely employed as a technique of reading, was, if one is to judge by Renaissance critical theory, seldom discussed or fully analyzed after Petrarch. When it was, as in Harington's Apology prefaced to his translation of Orlando Furioso, the result could be confusing. Generally critics were equipped with the handy assumption that all literature was susceptible to the figurative readings habitually given to Scripture, and the method was convenient to the allegorical interpretation of myth.

The Topic which I am undertaking to discuss—that of the relation between history and literary criticism—is one which today apparently invites the polemic style. I wish, however, to forego that style and at the same time to refrain from the special defence of, or attack upon, any critic or historian or any school of critics or historians. What I have in mind is the delineation of a certain issue which arises between literary criticism and historical scholarship. This issue I look upon as something unavoidably problematic, part of a troublesome opposition which runs through all our experience—between the particular and the universal, between the contingent and what is in any sense necessary, probable, or ideal, between what merely was and what in any way is. We may think Aristotle's statement that poetry is a more serious and a more philosophic thing than history only a rude beginning of theory (unhappily antithetical), but it is a beginning of something which can scarcely be left alone. The problematic relation between history and criticism has always existed. It may have been adjusted during one long epoch of our tradition, the classical, by a certain neglect of the claims of history. The modern advance of historical techniques and consequent sharpening of historical conscience have, however, sufficiently reasserted the problem and sufficiently increased its difficulty.

Listening to an orator delivering a speech or to a reader reciting good prose, we may notice, running through the speaker's utterances, a characteristic and persistent tune. The voice rises and falls, increases and diminishes, moves now slowly, now rapidly, throws emphasis upon one phrase and takes it away from another, not waywardly and erratically but in accordance with some underlying pattern or scheme of movement. It is this tune or pattern, in some of its simpler and more obvious features, that I mean to consider in this paper. The pattern is the rhythm of prose, and to chart it and discover its law is to effect for prose what metrical scansion does for verse.

To write The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne drew on mid-nineteenthcentury theories of the prose romance and the central situation of New England romances. The romance was distinguished from the novel by the idea of artistic distance; romancers wanted to set human experience at a distance from their readers' world so that the meaning of the experience would be more clear. To get the distance exactly right, they balanced three sets of opposites: verisimilitude and ideality; the natural and the marvelous; and history and fiction. Hawthorne discussed each of the balances and used them as part of his conception of the form of The Scarlet Letter. The central situation of most contemporary romances about Puritanism provided him with the conflict of the “fair Puritan” and the “black Puritan.” Hester is his “fair Puritan” whose capacity for feeling is opposed to the reasoned but harsh justice of his “black Puritan,” Chillingworth. These two characters in their roles as types define the extreme sides of the moral argument Hawthorne synthesizes in the complex characterization of Dimmesdale.

The triplet, like some other literary forms, had an origin, a period of growth, a maturity, and then an end. The triplet was an offspring of the pentameter couplet, but developed in its own way at its own rate. When the couplet was loose, open, and unpolished, there was little need for further variety, and poets wrote few triplets. When the couplet became tight, closed, and highly polished, as it did with Pope, the triplet was considered a violation of the rules. It was, consequently, only in the short period just before the apex of the couplet that the triplet could flourish: the period of John Dryden.

To live in a day when conceptions of poetry were undergoing rapid change was for Samuel Taylor Coleridge both an advantage and a misfortune. Perhaps his own work, which greatly advanced the change, gained a significance it could not have had in any other period. Yet by the same token, it was generally unappreciated by his contemporaries, inclined as they were to the old, narrow views of what constituted poetic merit. Lack of adequate criticism throughout almost the whole of Coleridge's lifetime is thus not difficult to explain. Nor is it a matter of mystery that two of his young disciples, John Sterling and Henry Nelson Coleridge, appear to have been, before his death in 1834, the only critics who approached his poetry with the same sympathetic effort at understanding that Coleridge himself employed when he criticised the work of others.