The profound change which became evident in Yeats's poetry with the publication of The Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914) was due in large measure to his defiant adoption of an aristocratic outlook and a corresponding expression of anti-democratic sentiments. It has generally been held that Castiglione's The Courtier, to which Lady Gregory introduced him in (probably) 1907, and his visit with her in the same year to Urbino, Ferrara, Ravenna, and Florence acted as the most important cultural stimuli behind his conversion to the aristocratic ideal and his conviction that this was most perfectly realized during the Renaissance. Yet during the period 1901–06 Yeats had been engaged in a continuous study of the three greatest writers of the English Renaissance. And it was in this process, I submit, that his commitment to the Renaissance, to aristocratic values, and, what is more, to an aristocratically oriented poetry, was finally accomplished.

Todo estudio y crítica referente al Poema de Mio Cid hace constar un hecho característico del mismo, su realismo. Sin embargo, creo que, por unas u otras razones, no se ha llegado a señalar claramente la verdadera importancia y alcance de ese realismo, o mejor dicho, su auténtica significación. Mi intención, en las líneas que siguen, es tratar de ponerla de relieve. Espero, con todo, no “imitar al pilluelo que, al ver una pared recién blanqueada, siente necesidad de mancharla escribiendo en ella alguna inconveniencia,” como don Ramón Menéndez Pidal, maestro en todo lo referente al Poema como en tantas otras cosas, ha dicho de los posibles cidófobos posteriores a su magno trabajo. No voy a tratar del Cid especialmente como personaje humano e histórico—aspecto al que don Ramón se refiere con las anteriores palabras—sino de la trama material y realista que el Poema ofrece a los ojos de quienes lo leemos hoy. Hay que tener en cuenta para ello, también, que otro rasgo bien conocido del Cantar es su verismo, “que rebosa por todas partes,”hasta el punto de que incluso “en menudos pormenores coincide el Poema con los datos históricos.” Milá y Fontanals lo consideraba como “fidelísimo espejo de un orden de hechos y costumbres que no serían bastantes a suplir los documentas históricos.” Sera inevitable, pues, que en algunos puntos de este trabajo me refiera también a la persona del Cid, quien, después de todo, si no puede ser considerado como un santo, tampoco como hombre sin honor ni ideales.

The comedias of the Golden Age in Spain present a field of investigation that seems to be inexhaustible. The dramatic productions of that unbelievably exuberant period are so numerous that no one can hope to read them all. Even to try to keep up with the research based upon them is a task of the first magnitude. These plays have been studied from the point of view of sources, dramatic technique, versification, style, dates of the plays, authorship, and much, much else.

It is no longer necessary to say that Benedetto Croce and several other critics have praised the works of Salvatore Di Giacomo. The poet, who wrote in the mellow and musical Neapolitan dialect, deserves such literary attention. However, his use of the dialect has unfortunately deprived Di Giacomo of the greater renown he would have received had he used the official Italian language. This is paradoxical because from the late Quattrocento through the early Seicento not only Italian literati but also European scholars, poets, and musicians collected, imitated, and set to music the semi-popular poems known as villanelle napoletane written in the Neapolitan dialect. Later these Neapolitan villanelle came to be called villanelle alla napoletana, or simply napoletane, attesting to the fact that they had become a tradition. For over a century ballads, songs, strambotti, rispetti, and madrigals were composed alla napoletana throughout Europe in the poetical mood and dance rhythm developed primarily by the villanelle songs of Naples.

“Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall” (Essays I, “Circles”). “Motion or change, and identity or rest are the first and second secrets of Nature: Motion and Rest” (Essays II, “Nature”). La résonance et le fond sont pascaliens; mais Emerson, très attentif aux accidents de la compensation, pourrait aussi bien répondre que ce n'est pas dans Pascal, c'est en lui-même qu'il trouve tout ce qu'il y voit.

If indeed noteworthy progress toward maturation in Giraudoux studies has been registered over the past ten or fifteen years, the deeper significance of much of his work remains to be fully appreciated. All too often, critics call Giraudoux précieux without having understood the special meaning he associated with this term; we are still influenced by the opinions of two generations who treated Giraudoux variously as a “chevalier de l'illusion,” or a “magicien optimiste,” while others spoke of the “jardins de Giraudoux” and his “éternel printemps.”Not until 1950 or thereabouts, when Antoine Adam wrote of the “Dureté de Giraudoux,” was criticism beginning noticeably to orient itself toward Giraudoux's pessimism and to find that therein lay one of the deepest currents of his life and art.

Anders als bei Kafka und Musil, den beiden anderen großen deutschsprachigen Romanciers aus dem böhmisch-österreichischen Sprachraum, hat Hermann Broch zeit seines Lebens Gedichte geschrieben und die Möglichkeiten der lyrischen Gestaltung hoch eingeschätzt. Seine Gesammelten Werke werden nicht von ungefähr mit dem Band Gedichte eröffnet. Das Echo, das diese Gedichte bisher gefunden haben, war äußerst gering. Claude Davids Urteil über Brochs Lyrik hat durchaus typische Bedeutung: “Man hat auch Gedichte Brochs veröffentlicht, die jedoch in den meisten Fällen nicht über das Niveau formaler Übungen hinausreichen.” Auch die Gedichtpartien, die Broch seinen Romanen einfügte, sind ähnlich abwertend beurteilt worden. Über die “Stimmen”, die Gedichte der Schuldlosen, wurde zum Beispiel in Times Literary Supplement bemerkt: “The stories … are linked by some of those homemade verses that German writers for the past century have been so ready to run up on their sewing-machines” (S. 210). Was diese Urteile miteinander verbindet, ist die Tatsache, daß die Maßstäbe der Bewertung von außen herangetragen werden. Welche Bedeutung das Lyrische innerhalb Brochs ästhetischer Anschauung hat, ist bisher nicht untersucht worden. Dieses Problem hat zwei Aspekte. Einmal geht es um die Frage nach Brochs spezifischer Auffassung des Gedichts, und zum andern ist die Frage damit verbunden, welche Funktion das Gedicht und allgemein das Lyrische in Brochs Romanen haben.

For swich lawe as a man yeveth another wight,
He sholde hymselven usen it, by right;
Thus wole oure text.

Among the many passages in which Chaucer or one of his characters talks about poetry, and more specifically Chaucer's own poetry, one of the most tantalizing is the Introduction to the Man of Law's Tale. The Man of Law claims to be at a loss for a “thrifty tale” because Chaucer “thogh he kan but lewedly / … Hath seyd hem in swich Englissh as he kan” (ii.46–49). He continues with a partial list of Chaucer's works that consists chiefly of stories from the Legend of Good Women, surprising us with several that Chaucer apparently never got around to writing. He praises Chaucer for avoiding stories about incest and alludes to two such tales with indignation. At last he declares that he will leave rhyme to Chaucer and tell a prose tale and immediately begins a prologue in rhyme royal.

In this paper I wish to suggest in broad outline a hypothesis concerning the unity of Fragment vu of the Canterbury Tales, based upon the thematic significance of the terms, “sentence” and “solaas.” I will not attempt to explicate any of the tales here, nor elaborate very fully upon their interplay of theme; rather, in introducing such a hypothesis, I will concentrate on the place inquiry must start: with the way Harry Bailly puts his own terms to use. This evidence will be drawn from the links, and lends itself to a fuller understanding of Chaucer's intent in putting Harry into the foreground of this series of tales, even as it leads towards the discovery of Chaucer's own principles of craft.

John Dryden's work is part of that great stylistic synthesis called neo-classicism; and in it the classical, particularly the Roman, past finds a new relevance to the modern world. The classical tradition not only remains a constant presence but also (in Reuben A. Brower's metaphor) exerts an “active pressure.” Awareness of this basic element, this Roman posture, in Dryden's art shows signs of disappearing behind the varied ingenuities of our own age of criticism. Since A. W. Verrall's lectures were first published in 1914, Dryden's work has been studied extensively and, we may say, has been looked at with new eyes. His great poem, Absalom and Achitophel (1681), has been recognized as a complex and highly sophisticated work of art. The past five years have brought (not to mention the reprinting of Verrall's lectures and the publication of many articles) three important books on Dryden's poetry. One is about Absalom and Achitophel; two others devote many pages of discussion to this poem. Each of these books reminds us, in a slightly different way, that when we have supplied the English equivalents for Biblical persons, institutions, and events we have scarcely begun to read Absalom and Achitophel.

Analysis of the rhetorical structure of Religio Laici, by directing attention to the form and development of the poem, clarifies its meaning. Such an analysis, further, enables us to accommodate equally appealing but apparently contradictory readings of the poem.

Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno, like many other poems of its period, celebrates God's goodness to men and the plenitude of His creation. But one need only compare it with other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works similar in theme—the quasi-scientific treatises of John Ray, William Derham, and Thomas Burnet, or James Thomson's The Seasons—to see how urgent and personally felt Smart's hymn of praise is. It was Smart's belief that God creates and sustains a cosmic harmony upon which the universe is contingent—in effect, God sings the universe into being—and the poet's duty is to serve as a kind of choir-master leading the creation in an answering song. Because harmony between God and His creation is necessary for the physical continuation of the universe, Smart's concern with the multitude of animals, birds, fish, plants, stones, and even planets in the Jubilate is much more than a rambling appreciation of them. He invokes them as models for men. For, in fulfilling their proper natures, the Lobster, the Hornet, and the Wild Beet contribute naturally to the universal harmony what man must contribute voluntarily, namely praise to the Creator of all.

The Little Boy lost
Father, father, where are you going
O do not walk so fast.
Speak father, speak to your little boy
Or else I shall be lost,
The night was dark no father was there
The child was wet with dew.
The mire was deep, & the child did weep
And away the vapour flew.

The Little Boy found
The little boy lost in the lonely fen,
Led by the wand'ring light,
Began to cry, but God ever nigh,
Appeard like his father in white.
He kissed the child & by the hand led
And to his mother brought,
Who in sorrow pale, thro' the lonely dale
Her little boy weeping sought.

In William Blake's Songs of Innocence appear two tiny, apparently simple poems that have, until recently, attracted relatively little critical attention. Some critics have ignored “The Little Boy lost,” and “The Little Boy found” entirely; others have treated them as relatively insignificant examples of innocence preserved.Several critics are clearly puzzled by the poems: Joseph Wicksteed, for example, finds the disappearance of the vapour in “The Little Boy lost” both mysterious and ultimately inexplicable (pp. 46–47), whereas E. D. Hirsch, Jr., has more recently admitted that the “best symbolic interpretation” of these two poems is “not characteristic of the Songs of Innocence.” Only one critic, Robert Gleckner, has argued for their importance in the Songs of Innocence, but Gleckner has perhaps gone too far in attempting to elevate them to the status of key poems in the Songs of Innocence.

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.

Artist first, then Poet,' some writer said of me. I should answer, 'Poeta nascitur non fit'; indeed, ‘Poeta nascitur et fit.‘ I suppose I was nearer thirty than twenty before I was anything of an artist.“ Tennyson, here reconstructing his early literary biography for his son's Memoir, mentions the metrical experiments à la Thomson, Pope, Scott, and Shakespeare with which he amused himself between the ages of eight and fourteen, commenting apparently on what one must do before beginning to become ”anything of an artist.“

Hawthorne was interested in polarities, and his writings show a keen concern for chiaroscuro effects through description and characterization. Both his fiction and the notebooks reveal his liking for sharp contrasts—light and shade in scene and mood. Hawthorne's use of slants of light and of mirror effects to highlight contrasts is well-known. “Lights and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know neither whence they come nor whither they go; nor do I inquire too closely into them.”

Thoreau's Walden has often been studied as a symbolic work exemplifying the romantic quest for rebirth. No one, however, has demonstrated that, like many other masterpieces of the period, its title identifies its chief symbol.My purpose is to demonstrate this point and show its significance for the work as a whole.