Like the king of England the president of the Modern Language Association reigns but he does not govern. His constitutional duties are negligible: he presides over a few meetings and he appoints a Committee on Resolutions. To those who fear that if the presidential term were extended beyond one year, they might have to listen to two or more addresses by the same incumbent, I bring comfort: nothing in the constitution nor the by-laws requires him to deliver any address whatever. But the president, again like the British monarch, retains one right—the right to be informed. I have sought to be informed during my year in office; and I pay hearty tribute to the Executive Secretary, other members of the Executive Council, members of the staff of the central administrative office, and about one hundred members of the Association who, in response to inquiry, wrote me, most of them at length, giving me their opinions on the structure and present conduct of our society. In many cases these commentaries were joint products of groups of humanists consulted by the writers of the letters. For what I am about to say, however, I only am responsible.

Los Estudios de crítica textual no suelen ser la materia más apropiada para los artículos como éste—artículos cuyo principal mérito ha de ser, junto con el interés, la brevedad. Claro es que los lectores que se interesaran en estas cuestiones no se contentarían con la descripción externa de los códices, ni con unas pocas observaciones sobre su valor relativo, sino que también esperarían un análisis paleográfico y diplomático, siquiera somero; la justificación de la genealogía propuesta mediante un buen número de ejemplos; la procedencia y vicisitudes bibliográficas de los ejemplares; los datos, en fin, que sobre tal o cual códice nos haya podido dejar algún personaje de nota que lo poseyó en determinado siglo ... Si pudiera satisfacer cumplidamente todas estas cuestiones, apenas creo que podría agotarlas en un volumen, y tampoco intentaré agotarlas en este breve informe. Por otra parte, al tratar de una obra importante, pero poco estudiada e inédita, como ésta que nos ocupa, también será preciso apuntar algo sobre la estructura y fuentes, antes de pasar revista a los manuscritos a través de los cuales ha llegado hasta nosotros.

In The Rhythm of Beowulf Professor John Pope has presented a convincing case for reading Beowulf as a structure of language ordered not only by stress-patterns but by stress-patterns within strict time-sequences. According to Pope's thesis the rhythm of most Old English poetry can be described as a series of measures equivalent in length (isochronous) though varying in the number of syllables they contain and in the stress-patterns enforced upon these syllables.

During recent years, despite—or possibly because of—T. S. Eliot's commendation, George Chapman's verse has appealed to a fit audience, though few indeed. One of the reasons for this neglect has been the inaccessibility resulting from insufficient knowledge of the tradition and technique of platonic allegory in the Renaissance. Since Battenhouse's pioneering effort at explicating The Shadow of Night, other scholars equipped with a fuller knowledge of platonic iconography and mythology have attempted to part the veil of obscurity by reestablishing a coherent intellectual and historical context and have enhanced our understanding of several of the more difficult poems, notably Hero and Leander and Ovids Banquet of Sence. It may be time to examine a poem which has not been noted for artistic accomplishment in order to determine to what extent such a context reveals a consistent poetic mode in Chapman's verse.

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.

From the eighteenth century to the present, editors, critics, and directors have recognized special problems in the interpretation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Every major play has been extensively debated, to be sure, but discussions of this play have been marked by an unusual perplexity. There is little agreement about the most elementary questions. Is Caesar an egocentric, dangerous dictator—a genuine threat to Rome; or is he the “noblest man / That ever lived in the tide of times,” as Antony says he is? Is Brutus the mistaken idealist, strong in abstract principle but weak in human perceptiveness; or is he, as Swinburne thought, the “very noblest figure of a typical and ideal republican in all the literature of the world”? Is he the Aristotelian hero, noble but flawed, recognizing at last that he has erred? Or is he the willful egoist, embodying the very traits of Caesarism which he professes to hate? Is Cassius the dedicated republican that Brutus, Titinius, and many of his own speeches make him appear to be? Or is he the “lean and hungry” envious one who hates Caesar for merely personal reasons? These are only a few of the questions the play poses. Everywhere one turns, contradictions loom.

Thomas Gray's Pindaric ode, “The Progress of Poesy,” completed in 1754, concludes with an odd definition of the “way” of the poet:

Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate,

Beneath the Good how far—but far above the Great.

On 5 February 1805 John Wordsworth, the poet's brother, drowned when the ship he was commanding was wrecked off the English coast near Weymouth. No one would want to deny Ernest de Selincourt's assertion that his death was “the most terrible blow that either William or Dorothy had ever suffered”; it can easily be taken, as it often is, as the blow which signals the decline of Wordsworth's poetic power, his shift to Christianity, and his withdrawal into the isolation of Rydal Mount. There is justification for seeing in John's death such crippling force, but the story is more interesting and less conclusive, particularly as it relates to Wordsworth's poetic development, which is what will concern us here.

Chroniclers of the American Dream have made progressively clear in recent years that the “dialogue” or “dialectic” it produced was the distinguishing feature of nineteenth-century American letters. An important consequence of the valuable studies carried out in particular by Marius Bewley, A. N. Kaul, R. W. B. Lewis, and Henry Nash Smith has been the rehabilitation of James Fenimore Cooper as an early and exemplary participant in this debate. According to Lewis, he is, as the creator of the “fictional Adamic hero unambiguously treated,” a partisan of the party of Hope in its skirmishes with the parties of Memory and Irony. In the more properly internalized drama presented by the others, he is the theater for a struggle between what Smith sees as his commitment to the “principle of social order” and his attraction to the “anarchic freedom” projected in Leatherstocking; what Bewley sees as Europe and America taken as value clusters similar to those later placed in dramatic opposition by Henry James; and what Kaul sees as “the history and the myth of American civilization,” acceptance and repudiation of ties with the corrupt European past. But this revised conception of Cooper's significance is in the process of passing into stereotype before it is validated. What remains to be done, what I propose to do, is to examine closely the texture of his habitual discourse. By isolating and relating those minute flourishes and recurring expressions which betray a writer's stance in its complexity, I hope to bring more clearly into focus the conflict between Cooper's formal theory, the conscious thesis of universal depravity which was the structuring principle in his religious and political philosophy (his acceptance of Europe as an abiding reminder of the human condition) and the half or barely articulated antithesis of meliorism (his rejection of Europe as the inevitable condition)— a conflict which did not so much end in an outright victory for either view as subside in a faltering synthesis.

Lionel Trilling has observed that Little Dorrit is “about the will and society” and that “the whole energy of the imagination in the novel is directed toward finding the non-personal will in which shall be our peace.” Little Dorrit is “not only the Child of the Marshalsea ... but also the Child of the Parable, the negation of the social will.” Professor Trilling's comment, enlightening over a large area of Dickens' work, seems to me especially applicable to the first and most germinal of Dickens' “dark novels,” Bleak House; and I want here to approach Bleak House through Dickens' analysis of will and society.

For a long time, the luxuriance of baroque imagery so conspicuous in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins has tended to obscure one of its fundamental characteristics. His is a poetry of statement, intellectually formulated even when at emotional white heat, and scarcely at all, in any usual sense, poetry of suggestion or atmosphere. He could not have permitted himself to write otherwise even if he had wished, and he did not wish. Though obviously the poetry does not lie in the statement—he himself was explicit about this—still, when he found that even Robert Bridges had continual difficulty in making out his literal meaning, he resolved, he said, “to prefix short prose arguments” to some of his work. “These too,” he added, “will expose me to carping, but I do not mind.”

The year 1966 marks the fiftieth anniversary of José Echegaray's death, and as yet a definitive study of his theater has not been made. Therefore, it would seem to be an appropriate time to take the first step toward a more complete examination of his work in order to point out several characteristics which are incompatible with the superficial labels attached to him and which blind one to the more meaningful ideas often present in his plays.

Cleanth Brooks wrote recently that the early story, “Fifty Grand,” “presents Hemingway's basic theme quite as well as The Old Man and the Sea.” “Nor do I think,” he continued, “that Hemingway in his most recent story now finds the world any more meaningful than he once found it.” For once Mr. Brooks was following rather than initiating opinion. Ever since The Old Man and the Sea was published, critics have admitted that in its effect upon the reader the book is somehow different from Hemingway's earlier work. Those who like the difference and those who do not have tried to account for it in many ways, most of them familiar to readers of the early reviews and of the surprisingly few later readings of the story. But to a man commentators have assumed that whatever the story's new impact—whatever the nature of that affirmative power most readers have felt—it reflects no essential change in Hemingway's view of an inscrutable natural order in which, ultimately, man can play no part. I want to suggest, on the contrary, that The Old Man and the Sea reveals Hemingway's successful achievement at last of a coherent metaphysical scheme—of a philosophical naturalism which, although largely mechanistic in principle, embraces the realm of human affairs and gives transcendent meaning to the harsh inevitabilities Hemingway has always insisted upon recording.

Surréalisme, n.m. Automatisme psychique pur par lequel on se propose d'exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit de tout autre manière, le fonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l'absence de tout contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique ou morale. ENCYCL. Philos. Le surréalisme repose sur la croyance à la réalité supérieure de certaines formes d'associations négligées jusqu'à lui, à la toute-puissance du rêve, au jeu désintéressé de la pensée. Il tend à ruiner définitivement tous les autres mécanismes psychiques et à se substituer à eux dans la résolution des principaux problèmes de la vie.