This yeats Centennial Year will witness the publication of widespread comment and encomium, “as though,” in Yeats's own words, “it were firmly established that the dead delight in anniversaries.” Now, as his first century joins its circle, Yeats is securely one of the “passionate dead,” who are, in his version of Ben Jonson's line, “So rammed with life they can but grow in life with being.” “Under Ben Bulben,” the elegiac poem which ends with Yeats's epitaph, written only a few months before he died in 1939, says of grave diggers

They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.

When the grave diggers had thrust Yeats back in the human mind, T. S. Eliot in a memorial lecture in 1940 called him “the greatest poet of our time—certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.” Few have contradicted this evaluation. The mass of biography, criticism, exegesis in the years since Yeats died has grown so enormously that his poetry has at times seemed to face the fate he thought the human imagination had suffered in the nineteenth century, that of being “laid in a great tomb of criticism.” In his Centennial Year scholars might most profitably concern themselves not with the mounting tomb of criticism but rather with the texts of Yeats's works and the tools for study which the quarter century since his death has produced.

Victor Hugo, le poète le plus éminent de son époque, était aussi un des romanciers les plus en vue de la jeune école romantique. Auteur dramatique, la richesse et la fécondité de son imagination étaient renommées. Sa réputation de penseur et d'artiste était grande. De moindres personnages eussent été satisfaits. Pas Hugo. Son ambition convoitait une réputation d'érudit. La parution de Notre-Dame de Paris en 1831 lui permit d'ajouter cette nouvelle fleur à sa couronne.

The Masque, or serenata, or pastoral opera, Acis and Galatea—in eighteenth-century printings it was indifferently categorized—has been not so much neglected as quite ignored by the biographers and critics of John Gay. In its entirety, words and music, it is a masterpiece, and the reasons for its lying unregarded, except by historians of music, deserve to be scrutinized because they signalize a recurrent failing on the part of those who write on the arts, when a work exists simultaneously in more than one medium. Only lately, in truth, has criticism begun to cope with Shakespeare himself as drama existent in and for living embodiment on a physical stage and nowhere else, not even in the mind of Coleridge. (Theatrical criticism is by habit only piecemeal commentary on separate productions.) Similarly, to set small matters beside great ones, only of late has the ballad of tradition begun to be considered as song and not as a literary or pseudo-literary genre, sufficient and self-sustaining in its text alone. And the bardic tradition of the Ugo-Slavs is teaching us much about the Homeric epics of which former generations were unaware. Signs, in fact, are here and there beginning to appear of an unwillingness to rest content with the one-dimensional conception of arts which are only half-fulfilled until they are realized in two dimensions or more. A drawing of a sculpture is not enough; a sculpture of an action is not enough; pantomime does not suffice the spoken scene; the verbal text of a musical scena will not satisfy. Nor can any of these be adequately criticized on a basis of missing dimensions.

Textual cruces in The Seafarer, especially those near the end of the poem, have been not so much resolved as relegated to the lumber room in the mansion of poetry. On the one hand, oral-formulaic analysts regard The Seafarer as a verse text of 124 lines, predominantly formulaic, probably composed by a learned poet. The major problem, under this view, is that of deciding to what extent it is formulaic and then inferring the manner of composition: does the unique text represent a slightly defective record of oral composition? does it represent a poem composed entirely in writing, with deliberation foreign to oral composition, though employing traditional formulas of oral poetry? or does the text perhaps preserve orally composed sections that have been remembered by a deliberate, lettered poet who has built these sections into a poem he composed pen in hand? On the other hand, the historical-thematic analysts, also regarding the poem as a 124-line composition, employing inherited poetic language, continue to adduce evidence converging on the conclusion that a homiletic writer has shaped traditional verse materials to his own pious ends. One can no longer question the pervasiveness of doctrinal and homiletic devices in the conception and diction of the poem. Both oral-formulaic analysis and historical-thematic analysis, by their very nature, tend to assume the integrity of an Old English text—allowing, of course, for copyists' lapses of attention and errors in understanding. Neither approach, however, has been particularly concerned to resolve some persistent question of the integrity of the text or to suggest ways of regarding the textual cruces in the final section of the poem.

So much study has gone into the rhetorical workings of Chaucer's satire that almost anyone who reads Chaucer is now acutely aware of the persona or narrator in each poem. The fact of a disparity between the narrator and Chaucer himself has become a kind of premise or dogma of Chaucer criticism; we have become accustomed to phrases like “the fictional Chaucer,” “the postures of the narrator,” or “the finiteness of the narrator-role.” And yet because his major poems confer upon him the status of a major figure, we continue to be interested in Chaucer the man despite the prevailing formalism of Chaucer criticism. We read minor works by him for which, were they anonymous, we should not take the trouble to turn a page. We talk about his education, thought, “development,” “mind.” And in his best poems we feel him as a “man speaking to men.” As for the man himself, we have a few records, though none of these really proves that civil servant and poet were the same person. Mostly, we believe in him. Of course it is entirely possible that someone will come along and argue that the Canterbury Tales were an instance of group authorship, or were really written by John of Gaunt; but if someone did, we should all pooh-pooh him and ostracize him and direct plenty of irony at him.

Ronsard's Hymne de la Philosophie, published in 1555, which in the single line, “Tout l'Univers discourt en sa pensée” (v. 28), sets the farthest limits of the cosmos as the boundaries of the soul's philosophic inquiry, contains in miniature a rudimentary version of the Hymne du Ciel, also of 1555:

Elle premiere a trouvé l'ouverture
Par long travail des secretz de Nature,
A sçeu de quoy les tonnerres se font,
Pourquoy la Lune a maintenant le front
Mousse, ou cornu, & pourquoy toute ronde
Ou demi-ronde elle apparoist au Monde,
A sçeu pourquoy le Soleil perd couleur,
Que c'est qu'il est, ou lumiere ou chaleur,
A sçeu comment tout le firmament dance,
Et comme Dieu le guide à la cadance,
A sçeu les corps de ce grand Univers,
Qui vont dançant de droit, ou de travers,
Ceux qui vont tost au son de l'harmonie, Ceux qui vont tard apres leur compagnie,
Comme Saturne aggravé de trop d'ans
Qui suit le bal à pas mornes & lens.
(viii, 90–91)

Among the Biblical types which Milton used to enrich his theme in Paradise Lost was that of Abraham, father of the faithful. James Sims has shown the parallel between the visit of the angels to Abraham at Mamre and Raphael's descent to Eden in Book v; John Parish has elaborated the resemblance between Abraham's plea for the Sodomites and Adam's dialogue with God in Book viii; and Barbara Lewalski has emphasized the spiritual vision of the man of faith in Books xi and xii: Abraham and his heirs view the promises “afar off,” just as Adam at this point sees far off the great symbolic Old Testament places. It is the purpose of this article to explore further the Abraham-Adam parallel in the last two books, showing in particular the relationship between Abraham's departure from Ur and Adam's from Paradise. From this relationship flow certain effects: the tone of the concluding episodes of Paradise Lost becomes clearer, their universal significance is emphasized, and the exile motif is harmonized with the concept of the journey of the epic hero. The virtues of Abraham are precisely those which Adam as Christian hero is called upon to practice, while both Abraham's setting forth to the land of Canaan and Adam's exile from Paradise are types of man's setting forth on his earthly pilgrimage.

The life of Richard Nash, Esq. is deservedly Oliver Goldsmith's best-known biography. It deals—very largely by the method of anecdote—with a man whose personality and career were intrinsically fascinating, and it exhibits throughout not only Goldsmith's inimitable easy style but also an attitude toward its subject perfectly balanced between irony and compassion. Apart from praising the work in general terms, however, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the Life of Nash and have provided only a cursory account of its sources and of the circumstances surrounding its composition and publication. In this article, I offer more specific information about the biography's sources—what Goldsmith called the materials of history—as well as some new details concerning Nash's affairs during the last years of his life. I have found a substantial amount of this new information through an effort to discover the identity of a man who played a vital part in the Life, George Scott.

The self-portrait of James Boswell which emerges from the conversations, letters, and editorial comments of The Life of Johnson has lineaments of authority as well as uncertainty. There were subjects on which Boswell spoke consistently and with assurance. Nothing so much gives the lie to his old reputation of grovelling servitude as his steadfast opposition to Johnson's pronouncements on public affairs. All the difference of their years and of their characters are revealed in the younger man's opinions, which, despite a disclaimer in 1779 of interest or ability in “political speculation,” are numerous and sound assured. It is fascinating to isolate Boswell's views, to ponder their apparent contradictions, and finally to discover a complexity of convention and rebellion, tradition and modernity parallel to other expressions of his personality.

Though formal verse satire was a major genre in the Augustan age, students of satire have generally been reluctant to define its essential traits. Perhaps the most illuminating study is Mary Claire Randolph's “The Structural Design of the Formal Verse Satire.” She remarks that the satire of Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal was “bi-partite in structure,” that a particular vice or folly was attacked in “Part A,” and its opposite virtue praised in “Part B.” There is always more attack than praise in satire “since, paradoxically, in the very act of presenting the negative or destructive side of human behavior the satirist is establishing a positive foundation on which he can base his specific recommendation to virtue.” Whether introduced by direct exhortation, implication, or quotable proverb, the “admonition to virtue” is inevitably present in formal verse satire: “it must be there, spoken or unspoken, if the piece is to be more than mere virulence and fleeting invective. … In any case, whatever the plan, the positive rational mode of procedure advocated or unmistakenly implied in a satire will be the precise opposite of the vice or folly ridiculed.”

With only small exceptions, The Mill on the Floss can be seen as adequately representative of even the most mature of George Eliot's art—morally energetic yet unsentimentally perceptive about the meaning of experience. Like all of her works, it is thoroughly coherent and gains its coherence from a unified vision. But the vision, here as elsewhere, is, I would argue, incomplete. There were elements in experience, that is, which she was never fully able to assimilate and which, as was true of most of the major Victorian writers, she was genuinely unable to see. She pushed the boundaries of Victorian experience as far as any of her contemporaries and moved to the brink from which one can observe the modern sensibility, but inevitably she pulled back.

There is no larger horror than that which Bartleby represents in the world Melville creates through his first person narrator. Bartleby calls into question all that the narrator is. The peculiar power of the story arises from the effect of the absolute solidity of the lawyer-narrator: his impeccable respectability, the growing pleasure he takes in his comforts and accomplishments. This man who insists on telling us of Bartleby, “the strangest” scrivener he has ever encountered, is a man for whom all things ought to have their place; he attempts to discover where Bartleby belongs and what things belong to Bartleby. The unique effect of the story lies in the reader's recognition that though the narrator feels, no matter how inconclusively, that he has placed him in some way, he has, in fact, not placed him at all.

James's youthful ideas about the form of fiction are the germs of the principles expressed in the late prefaces. But his earliest dicta, in comparison to the late, are arid and formalist—dogmatically proclaimed, not experimentally discovered. They hint of an American Gallophile, infatuated with the rigid lines and harsh economy of the well-made play and the well-made novel. In 1874 James announced: “We confess to a conservative taste in literary matters—to a relish for brevity, for conciseness, for elegance, for perfection of form” (LRE, p. 139). He never renounced such a taste; “brevity” and “perfection of form”—more frequently “economy” and “composition”—are as prominent, indeed as hieratic, in the prefaces as in the earliest reviews. But if James seems to have acquired his literary standards artificially and to have begun his career with a set of a priori principles to guide him, it was not long before he was to make these ideas his own by fully understanding their relevance to the craft of fiction. The early assumptions are not repudiated, but tested, clarified, and deepened. There is a remarkable balance in James's mature criticism between the general principle and the pragmatically discovered insight. Though the insistence on economy and order is never relaxed, the concepts become increasingly more flexible; with ease they accommodate notions of fiction that seem contradictory. James repeatedly exults in the freedom of the novelist: “the Novel remains still, under the right persuasion, the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms” (AN, p. 326). Indeed to James it is plastic enough and prodigious enough to allow for the reconciliation of the art of Scribe with that of Balzac, and of the principles of Coleridge with those of Flaubert.

Modern criticism has frequently practiced symbolical analysis without developing the necessary procedural controls, without establishing clear criteria of relevance for suggested symbolical meanings and overtones. Such unrestrained symbolical analysis tends to suffer from two typical defects. First, it tends to slight the line-by-line texture of a work. In practice, if not always in theory, it tends to slight “surface” detail. “Overt” meanings become, in Freudian terms, “disguise,” to be unraveled as the deeper meanings come into focus “like repressed material under psychoanalysis.” Logical categories become, in Jungian terms, “rationalizations,” to be penetrated as the critic becomes “sensitive to the tap-roots below.” At the same time, unrestrained symbolical interpretation often does violence to the structure of a work. It threatens to destroy a work's unity of fable, theme, or tone. Programmatic announcements to the contrary, the prevailing practice of such criticism fails to pay sufficient heed to Henry James's claim that “in proportion as the work is successful the idea permeates and penetrates it, informs and animates it, so that every word and every punctuation-point contribute directly to the expression”; to E. M. Forster's requirement that “every action or word ought to count.”

Although almost anyone's list of Sherwood Anderson's successes in fiction would include “The Man Who Became a Woman,” this haunting story has provoked less commentary than it deserves. Irving Howe provides the fullest discussion in Sherwood Anderson, though the nature of his book prevents him from treating the story in detail, and we may take his interpretation of it as standard. For Howe, “The Man Who Became a Woman” is concerned essentially with homosexuality, showing us an older man not even yet “secure in his male adulthood” who is driven to narrate some extraordinary experiences of his youth: experiences in which “psychic needs and moral standards clash,” and which may reveal the youth's “hysteria as a result of accumulated anxieties about his sexual role.” In what follows, I shall not be denying that homosexuality is a major motif, but arguing that Anderson is writing about something more: about a particular integrity of being that the youth must experience as a requisite for growing up. To this extent I shall be reversing Howe's emphasis, suggesting that the story centers on the conditions under which the narrator matures, and taking the homosexuality as one instance among others of the narrator's special quality—his openness to the contrarieties of experience. Perhaps some support for this reading inheres in the fact that the teller periodically denies being homosexual in any ordinary sense (e.g., pp. 188, 207, 209): while these denials may be seen as his psychologically necessary effort to shield himself from the truth, they may also be plausibly viewed as indications that the heart of the story's significance lies elsewhere. In any event, the teller himself—when addressing the reader on behalf of the story—insists on its unconventionality: “I'm puzzled you see, just how to make you feel as I felt that night. … I'm not claiming to be able to inform you or to do you any good. I'm just trying to make you understand some things about me” (p. 208). Disclaiming a traditional instructional or ethical aim, he invites us simply to participate in his crucial experience on “that night.”

It has long been recognized that Joyce's writing is a texture of epiphanies and that the basic pattern in most of his major works is a chronological cycle tracing man's life from childhood and youth to maturity and sometimes age. The combination of these devices largely explains the structure of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and both are used in conjunction with other techniques in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Although Joyce's use of them has been much discussed, the influences that led him to combine them have been less fully explored. The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of the liturgy of the Epiphany season on Joyce's concept of epiphany and his use of the cycle pattern at the period he was writing Dubliners. Related liturgical influences on Dubliners will be discussed.

The following words describe Vasco Bruno's mental state, not merely while in the military hospital, but throughout his life as one of Érico Veríssimo's most important heroes. More interesting, they summarize Veríssimo's creative activities through the seven novels preceding O Tempo e o Vento:

Nestas longas horas de hospital tomo e retomo as minhas lembranjas e bem como um menino que brinca com esses cubos de madeira em cujas faces estao colocados fragmentos simetricos dum quadro, procure formar com minhas experiencias um painel que tenha sentido revelador. Viro e reviro os blocos coloridos; ten to as mais diversas combinajoes, fico alvorojado, pensando que cheguei a algum resultado claro, para no fim verificar que tudo nao passa duma caleidoscopica confusao sem pe nem cabefa. Desisto do jogo. Mas fico com a secreta esperanja de que com os elementos de que disponho, um dia ainda hei de resolver o problema. (Saga, p. 120)

After certain preliminaries, Baudelaire plunges into the main body of his essay on laughter, “De l'essence du rire,” with these striking words: “Le Sage ne rit qu'en tremblant. De quelles lèvres pleines d'autorité, de quelle plume parfaitement orthodoxe est tombée cette étrange et saisissante maxime? Nous vient-elle du roi philosophe de la Judée? Faut-il l'attribuer à Joseph de Maistre, ce soldat animé de l'Esprit-Saint? J'ai un vague souvenir de l'avoir lue dans un de ses livres, mais donnée comme citation, sans doute. Cette sévérité de pensée et de style va bien à la sainteté majestueuse de Bossuet; mais la tournure elliptique de la pensée et la finesse quintessenciée me porteraient plutôt à en attribuer l'honneur à Bourdaloue, l'impitoyable psychologue chrétien.” Of course, it is the variations which Baudelaire extracted from his somber theme, “Le Sage ne rit qu'en tremblant,” and, even more, his own original suggestions, which are of primary interest to the reader and student of Baudelaire. But in view of the speculations which occupy most of the passage above, the secondary question of the source of that theme is one which obviously intrigued Baudelaire and one, therefore, which calls for an answer from his present-day students.

David H. Stewart, in his “Anna Karenina: The Dialectic of Prophecy” (PMLA, lxxix, 266–282), mentions the epigraph of the novel (“Vengeance is mine, I shall repay, saith the Lord”) without making it clear that it is a well-known Biblical quotation (Romans xii.19) and without considering the implications of this fact. I shall give the verse and the two which follow it in full (in the King James version) because of the importance of the original context of the statement: