In the halcyon days of the MLA, when I was young and my revered master, John Manly, was still in his prime, it was our custom to highlight the program for the annual meeting with two major speeches: a smoke-talk at the big dinner we used to have, and a presidential address. The difference in name reflects a difference in form and matter: the smoke-talk was expected to be in lighter vein; the presidential address, in heavier vein (if I may say so). It was the aim of the smoke-talker above all to be amusing; witty if possible but funny at least. And his success was measured by the number of times he made his audience laugh. The smoke-talk was nearly always well attended, for hope springs eternal in the academic breast. There were those, I admit, natural cynics or members disillusioned by repeated disappointment, who came to the dinner but slipped out after eating their dessert and drinking their coffee, but we could always think they were fleeing the foulness of the tobacco-laden air rather than the prospective boredom of the two speeches (for the smoke-talker had to be introduced and the introducer might speak as long as the speaker). But most of us stuck it out, tobacco smoke and all, and more often than not we went away well content. The most satisfying evening of this kind that I can remember was one at Harvard back in the twenties, when George Kittredge was the smoke-talker and Charles Grandgent introduced him. My mouth waters for more when I think of that pair of speeches. It is a pity that we had to give up the smoke-talk and the dinner that went with it, but there are too many of us nowadays to sit down to a meal together in one room, and so much goes on at our meetings that a whole evening devoted to corporate, communal pleasure (or what passes for pleasure) has become more than we have any right to expect.

The Beowulf Poet's extraordinary facility in using a vast and diverse word-hoard has long excited students of the poem. Among the critical studies, discussions of vocabulary rank high in number, and almost every conceivable approach to the subject has been investigated either in part or with a high degree of thoroughness. Single words, such as ealuscerwen, and groups of related words, such as rime-words, kennings, and words of Christian content or reference, have received close attention, as well as larger lexical patterns, such as variation and the formulaic texture, while further studies have compared the vocabulary with that of other Old English poems or Nordic literatures. Aside from purely lexicographical or etymological inquiries, there are three perspectives to which these many discussions generally belong: 1) descriptive: usually statistical observations about the number of compounds relative to simplices or of formulas relative to the whole vocabulary of the poem, or a comparison of the frequency of certain lexical types with other poems, or a classification of the habits of word-formation; 2) figurative and appellative: the types of verbal figures and their analogues elsewhere in Old English and Old Norse; and 3) usage: the use of words in particular contexts or for specific effects, and the structural use of synonymic substitution and variation. The first emphasis is important because it reveals the composition and its formative strata of the poem's total vocabulary, and also the lexical relationships with other poetry or poetic traditions. The second serves to isolate a lexical stratum which is by nature exclusively poetic and to observe how much of this stratum is probably original and how much traditional. But it is the third perspective which is interested most essentially in the poet, since here the attempt is made to discern the many ways by which he has used language significantly to dramatize, emphasize, elucidate, intimate, and so on. Much that has been written in this category has concerned itself with the larger patterns of variation as a characterizing, describing, or structural device, rather than with smaller, more confined, strokes of verbal association and verbal play. A well-known instance of the latter is the epithet for Grendel, healoegn (142) which, in its context, wherein a bona fide hall-thane anxiously seeks out a hiding place as protection against the intruder, may with complete justification be termed ironic, and the same thing may be said of a similar appellation used later for both Grendel and Beowulf, renweardas (770), There are also hints here and there that the poet may have been influenced by learned Latin figures. Many years ago Albert Cook compared flod blode weol (1422; Exodus 463, flod blod gewod) to Aldhelm's fluenta cruenta (De Virginitate, 2600), and more recently H. D. Meritt called attention to the similarity between Hrothgar's warning that in death “eagena bearhtm / forsiteo ond forsworces” (1766b-67a) and Aldhelm's “ferreus leti somnus palpebrarum conuolatus non tricaverit” (De Virg. Prose, 321.7, ed. Ewald). It is in the smaller strokes, I think, that the poet's acumen and craft are most incisively contained, and it is to some of these that the present discussion is devoted.

Dante Scholars have long recognized the central role played by the first Canto of the Comedy. In the last half-century the wealth of hidden riches contained in the Canto has received such emphasis that as early as 1925 P. Luigi Pietrobono could defend the Canto against those detractors who felt that its allegorical structure led to an obfuscation of thought. For Pietrobono, “Nel primo Canto Dante ha poste le basi del più complesso e armonioso edificio d'arte che mente umana abbia mai con-cepito; e perô, anzichè correre a criticare e a supporre che un cosî mirabile costruttore di mondi si sia sentita tremar la mano proprio nel tirarne le prime linee, direi molto più con-veniente volgere l'ingegno a ricercare il fine a cui con la sua opera intendeva.” He then proceeded to single out the many Biblical echoes that resound throughout the Canto, with special emphasis on the drama of the resurrection of Israel.

Although as a whole Chaucer's Monk's Tale is justly criticized for dullness, its opening two tragedies, the Lucifer and the Adam, form an effective and related pair:

If “much adverse criticism has been spent on [Milton's] allegorical figures of Sin and Death,” the blame lies less with the poet or his critics than with time—with the evolution of poetic theory and its inevitable corollary, the relativity of critical standards. The principles underlying the composition of Paradise Lost are by no means identical with those by which the poem has been judged. In the case of much neo-classical criticism, this disparity is particularly significant, as its basic assumptions are often so close to Milton's that one overlooks their actual divergence.

The earlier poets in the English meditative tradition, Southwell, Alabaster, Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw, were all poets of Catholic or Anglo-Catholic tendency, where the Continental art of meditation found a fertile ground in which to develop an English counterpart. It is significant that all five of these earlier poets became priests: Southwell, bred and executed as a Catholic; Alabaster, shifting from Anglican to Catholic to Anglican; Donne, born and bred a Catholic, but turning finally to the English Church; Crashaw, born and bred a Protestant, but turning finally to the Roman Church; and Herbert, happy all his life within the English communion. They had their doctrinal differences, and I do not wish to minimize those differences; but they had something more in common: a devotion to the central mysteries of the Passion, a devotion to the symbols and a liturgy that served to celebrate those mysteries. All would have agreed with George Herbert's vision of “The Agonie”: Who knows not Love, let him assay And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike Did set again abroach; then let him say If ever he did taste the like. Love is that liquour sweet and most divine, Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.

The poems which Juan Francisco Andres de Uztarroz wrote during the last two years of his life have long been considered lost. Don Ricardo del Arco, in reconstructing the intellectual and cultural life of seventeenth-century Aragon which centered around this famous historiographer, archaeologist, bibliographer, and poet, states that the autograph manuscript containing these poems was seen by the eighteenth century bibliographer, Felix de Latassa, but that it disappeared sometime later and its contents have remained unknown: “Desconocemos gran parte de sus poesfas, sobre todo las breves que vio Latassa en manuscrito.”

In 1828, about twenty-two years before the appearance of his second novel and chef-d'oeuvre, The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne paid $100.00 to arrange the anonymous publication of Fanshawe, his first novel. Almost immediately upon its public appearance, however, he tried to acquire all available copies in order to destroy them, and enjoined family and friends to silence about his authorship. His suppression of the novel was so successful that when a rare copy turned up twelve years after his death, his wife Sophia at first denied that he was the author. Nowadays a minor bibliographical treasure, Fanshawe can also be valuable to scholars as a primer of Hawthorne's style, because despite its defects—imitativeness, disjointedness, occasional silliness—it provides an opportunity for observing basic characteristics of his writing as they appear at the beginning of his career, secretive and abortive as it was. Even in The Marble Faun, his last completed novel, the manner, characters, and themes of Fanshawe can be clearly discerned. As Stanley Williams has put it: “The characters are thin and two-dimensioned, the dialogue pretentious; but a contemporary was right in declaring that in Fanshawe we may detect the weak and timid presence of all of Hawthorne's peculiar powers.”

This article will offer an interpretation of Wuthering Heights based upon the extraordinary sadism which underlies Emily Bronte's concept of emotional relationships and indicate the significance of her preoccupation with infanticide. Unless one appreciates the importance of infanticide and sadism in Wuthering Heights, one cannot appreciate the nature of the love between Catherine and Heathcliff, a love which I believe to have been frequently misunderstood, nor can one understand the motivation behind Heathcliff's killing of his own son. My chief contention is that Wuthering Heights is basically a perverse book—I use the word without its usual pejorative connotations—and that its power is owing precisely to its perversity.

Much of the charm of Huckleberry Finn results from Twain's having tempered his satire with long, lyric descriptions of the Mississippi River, and, conversely, the bitter tone of Melville's The Confidence-Man has turned away readers because of the lack of any comparable scenic relief. “The setting Melville hit upon was the perfect one for such a book, but the setting is named or indicated rather than fully rendered. One is alleged to be on a steamboat descending the greatest of American rivers, but sensuously, pictorially, kinaesthetically, one has little or no sense of being on such a boat or such a river.” The opinion is Newton Arvin's, who credits this absence of natural description to the low ebb of “Melville's purely plastic power, his fictive and dramatic power.” According to Arvin, “the magical power of sensuous embodiment that had rendered the sea with such grandeur in Moby Dick had now failed him, all but wholly.”

Scholars have for many years been showing how responsive Walt Whitman was to the world around him and how his writings reflect his interest in the affairs and ideas of mid-nineteenth-century America. Not only are the rhythms and tones of contemporary opera and oratory incorporated in his poetic style, but so also are contemporary scientific, social, and cultural interests scattered throughout the content of his prose and the imagery of his verse. My purpose here is to show Whitman's indebtedness to the contemporary fad of animal magnetism, especially concerning its appearance in the phraseology and nature of many of his poetic images and in his conceptions of the poet and the leader.

In the first pages of The Brothers Karamazov the narrator recalls that he knew a young lady of the last romantic generation who, because of insuperable obstacles to union with her lover—all of which she had invented—one stormy night threw herself off a high precipice into a deep, rapid river. By this act she was able to satisfy her desire to be like Shakespeare's Ophelia; but, the narrator adds, had the precipice been less picturesque—a fiat mud bank, for instance—the suicide most probably would not have taken place. The romantic heroine, whose fate Dostoevsky brings up here only as an aside in his attempt to explain why Adelaida Ivanovna had married Fyodor Karamazov, recalls a character type which flourished on the pages of his works in the 1840's. Every reader of Dostoev-sky's early works will remember his bookish heroes, who prefer the beautiful improbabilities of romantic novels and the fantasies of their own minds to the reality they must live in. I am thinking of such obvious examples as the hero of White Nights, who for eight years has been intimately acquainted with characters from works of Hoffman, Scott, Goethe, and Mérimée, but who does not know a single real person in St. Petersburg. I am thinking, also, of the little hero from the story of the same name, who, in the seconds before he leaps on the unridable horse Tankred, sees in his mind's eye pictures of damsels, tournaments, pages, and all the paraphernalia of chivalry. As one who prefers fantasies to reality, Golyadkin of The Double is an obvious example; but even Makar Devushkin of Dostoevsky's first published work, Poor Folk, turns his back on the miserable conditions of his daily life and plays out the role of the generous benefactor to a young girl, even though the added economic burden drives him to drink and penury. There is hardly a work in the forties that does not have its dreamer: Netochka Nezvanova, huddled in a miserable corner looking across the street to the splendid house and dreaming of an improbable life, is a summary image of the hero of the forties.

When in 1934 Edmund Wilson published his brilliant and provocative essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” in which he questions the reliability of James's center of revelation in “The Turn of the Screw,” he provided scholars an intriguing method for approaching much modern fiction. It seems to me that, for example, Roy P. Basler's reading of Poe's “Ligeia” as the unbalanced narrator's unwitting admission that he has murdered his second wife through inability to forget his first, and Simon O. Lesser's interpretation of Hawthorne's “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” as a revelation of unconscious reluctance to seek a substitute father both owe much to Mr. Wilson. And so do a host of recent Jamesian critics: for two examples among at least a dozen, Marius Bewley, who regards Oliver Lyon, the central intelligence of “The Liar,” as more culpable than the prevaricating colonel; and William Bysshe Stein, who, far from sympathizing with Pemberton in “The Pupil,” brands him a prude. The temptation to doubt the accuracy of the narrator or the central intelligence of a short story by Henry James is beguiling, fatally so sometimes; but succumbing to the temptress can give pleasure to the reader often and an enriched meaning to many a story.

Late in his life, in 1933, Yeats read Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love “with excitement,” and found the love story of Lady Chatterley's Lover “noble.” In Lawrence he found an ally “directed against modern abstraction”; and he considered that, with Joyce, Lawrence had “almost restored to us the Eastern simplicity.” A hatred of Abstraction; a fearless plunge into the mire of human existence; an anti-intellectual stance (which was almost at times a pose); and a mythopoeic conception of art and life: these Yeats and Lawrence shared, whatever their differences—which were considerable. And what they shared accounts in part for their similar response to Goethe's Wilhelm Meisler and that hero's search for experience: it was, they felt, guided too dominantly by intellectual choices. In 1928 Lawrence wrote to Aldous Huxley that he thought “Wilhelm M eisler … amazing as a book of peculiar immorality, the perversity of intellectualised sex, and the utter incapacity for any development of contact with any other human being, which is peculiarly bourgeois and Goethian.” Yeats remarked that Goethe, a man “in whom objectivity and subjectivity were intermixed,” could “but seek … [Unity of Being] as Wilhelm Meister seeks it intellectually, critically, and through a multitude of deliberately chosen experiences.” He insisted that “true Unity of Being … is found emotionally, instinctively, by the rejection of all experience not of the right quality, and by the limitation of its quantity.” But for Yeats, the poet, it was less problematic than for Lawrence, the novelist, to crusade against Abstraction and Intellection: the poem had its gnomic power to snap meaning at you in an instant of time; the novel had somehow to have people and a story —and a world in which both could occur.

Commentators on the works of George Bernard Shaw almost invariably acknowledge his great indebtedness to Shelley. Their remarks are, however, limited to a passing statement or, at most, a page or two in which Shaw's enthusiasm for Shelley receives a very general treatment—several quotations from Shaw (and there are two or three favorites) usually being cited as evidence which needs little if any elaboration. Few of the numerous instances in which Shaw directly acknowledges his debt to Shelley have been noted by critics, to say nothing of an examination of decidedly Shelleyan ideas which are prominent in Shaw's writings. I propose, therefore, to trace in considerable detail the background of Shaw's interest in Shelley, its effect upon him, his opinions about Shelley and his art, and especially his agreements and disagreements with important ideas held by Shelley.