We venture to reaffirm the policy which has guided the selection of articles during the past decade, namely, that PMLA should reflect the most distinguished American scholarship in the modern languages and literatures. It is not a place for beginners to try their wings, unless those wings are used for sure and significant flight; and it is not a place for established scholars to publish their incidental writings, unless those writings compare in excellence and value with those of younger men. As the official Publications of the Modern Language Association of America PMLA should publish to the learned world the most important work of members of the Association.

It is unnecessary to remind this learned audience that the title of this paper was borrowed from the eloquent sermon of Bossuet, delivered almost three hundred years ago, on “The Eminent Dignity of the Poor in the Church.” My feeble voice cannot emulate the majestic periods of the great orator. My only ambition is, in a familiar sermon, to define the position granted to our studies in modern society,—a position somewhat similar to that of the poor in the aristocratic society of the seventeenth century. My purpose is to claim for them the eminent dignity which belongs to them, and to justify the recognition they should obtain at least in academic circles.

In Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer as commentator occupies an unusual role. It is indeed common for authors to enter their own works in many ways. Writers as diverse as Homer, Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, Fielding, Thackeray, and George Eliot all do so. Sometimes, as with Fielding, the author may keep a distance between himself and his story; sometimes, as with Dante, he may penetrate into his story as a major or the major character; and sometimes, as with Homer, he may both enter and withdraw at will. When Homer directly addresses one of his characters, he is deliberately breaking down, for artistic reasons, the aloofness to which he generally holds.

The most pretentious treatise on Castilian versification before the Golden Age is the “Libro segundo en que trata de la prosodia i sîlaba” of Antonio de Nebrija's Gramdtica castellana, first published in 1492. It is written by a scholar—not a poet, though Nebrija, Spain's first great humanist, did write some verses—a scholar whose classic learning determined his approach to the study of the vernacular in matters of versification. Nebrija's learning, however, did not blind him to the fundamental facts of Castilian practice in verse, though it may have slightly obscured his vision at times and warped his interpretation of certain phases of Spanish metrics. And it did cause him to discover in Castilian verse certain fundamental principles hidden from many theorists and prosodists even to the present day, yet for centuries instinctively practiced by poets. Nebrija studied and analyzed the nature of Castilian verse “en el buen uso” (Cap. viii) as it existed shortly before the introduction of Italianate meters in Spanish. The time is significant, as En-cina explains in the introduction to his Arte de poesia castellana (p. ii):

The question of the dignity of man and his place in the universe was much discussed in the Renaissance. With an inflated idea of their departure from medieval tradition, the thinkers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries tried hard to arrive at a new, “humanistic,” evaluation of man. We know now, of course, that their departure was not as sharp as they thought and that certain traditional arguments persisted in one form or another. Herschel Baker, in his study, The Dignity of Man, published in 1947, showed the persistence of some themes and the introduction of others, especially in the Neoplatonic and Protestant thinkers. It is the purpose of this article to examine the way in which the question was handled by Montaigne, who was up to date in his readings on the subject and who had the advantage of coming at the end of the Continental Renaissance; to determine the extent of his departure from tradition, the paths which he followed in his thinking, and the degree of independence which he exercised. Since man is the central subject of the Essais, Montaigne's opinions are likely to be well thought out and carefully formulated. The material presented here can hardly be new; it is the sweep and originality of Montaigne's views that need to be pointed out.'

Aprominent verbal characteristic of Henry Fielding's The History of the Life of the late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great is the excessive use of the words “great” and “greatness.” That this serves certain specific purposes in the political and moral satire of the work has long been recognized. That it may owe something to the writings of Machiavelli is nowadays likely to pass unnoticed by readers who are not acquainted with the particular translation from which Fielding derived his surprisingly detailed and extensive knowledge of that author. Actually, Jonathan Wild contains numerous echoes of passages in the writings of Machiavelli. In addition to resemblances involving portions of the Prince and Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, there are numerous parallels in content, structure, and diction with the Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca There is visible adaptation of Machiavelli's method in the Life of Castruccio in that Fielding plays with the conventions of classical imaginative biography. There is also burlesque of Machiavelli's historical method. In sum, Jonathan Wild is at once an imitation, a parody, and a criticism of Machiavelli.

It is not surprising that André Chénier's poem L'Invention has been much discussed, and that the discussion has been conducted almost exclusively along the lines of literary history. To begin with, this poem excited the greatest attention on the part of critics and scholars in the heyday of the historical method. Secondly, it is, or seems to be, a poetic manifesto, containing doctrines and ideas which lend themselves to consideration in abslraclo. Thirdly, this manifesto is uniquely provocative of historical and comparative analyses since it appears to mark a turning away of the poet from the aesthetic which characterizes the bulk of his extant work, and to herald the composition of important new works which exist only in disappointing fragments. Thus, the reader who follows the tortuous course of Chénier criticism plotted by Paul Glachant and who has read Paul Dimoff's more recent study, finds raised over and over again, in connection with L'Invention, questions which have little to do with the poem considered as a poem. Was Chénier the last of the classicists, the critics and scholars ask, or was he the first of the romanticists? Did he have two manières, or three, or one which could be pulled inside out and only appear different, like a reversible garment? If Hermès and L'Amérique, the poems which L'Invention seems to foreshadow, had been completed, would they have been masterful epics, or epic failures? These questions, and others like them, are discussed at length, but only rarely and negligently do the students of L'Invention hint that it is itself a poem and not merely a discursive recipe for the writing of poetry. Yet, L'Invention obviously is a poem in spite of its doctrinal “message,” and as such must be read with an eye for those poetic principles which should inform it, which should guarantee its organic unity, its formal autonomy. Such a literary reading must be the basis for any discussion of the ideas contained in the poem.

An enthusiasm for this novel is not, nowadays, an easy thing to share. Unless one moves in circles professionally devoted to German literature, the mention of its title is likely to call up among literary people the following notions: that T. S. Eliot has not approved of Goethe, while nineteenth-century England did, both facts still, to many, rather discouraging; that the Bildungsroman, of which Goethe's novel is the great example, is a sloppy and self-indulgent genre—there is no form, since it just goes autobiographically on and on, nor any proper commitment to experience, which the self-obsessed hero only passes through; that this one might be full of “wisdom,” perhaps, but that here is precisely its greatest fault, for what can wisdom be but smug “Victorian” moralizing or analyzing or generalizing, mere simplifying abstraction at best, and the death of all actuality, complexity, and charm. Nor is it fashion alone which accounts for the novel's virtual disappearance from our intellectual landscape. No, even when it is read it tends to be disliked. Press it on the up-to-date intelligent reader, the reader who devours the Russians or Stendhal or Flaubert or Proust with joy, and more often than not—such has been my experience—he will find it repulsively cold-blooded, even frivolous, in its treatment of human affairs. It is sometimes admitted that what happens in the novel, at least after the rather long flash-back at the beginning, ought to be interesting enough. But, the complaint is, one is hurried through even the big scenes at a pace that is shockingly sprightly. There is no sign that the author feels anything or wants us to feel anything. One is hurried on, moreover, to no particular purpose. Instead of “adding up,” the story rambles in the most outmoded way. And so forth.

Despite all the vast amount of paper and ink devoted to the topic headed “Goethe and Music,”—and students of the subject may well be impressed to learn that Calvin Brown, after checking the extensive bibliography of this field recently issued in book form by Frederick Sternfeld, found some seventy titles in his own file which were not in Sternfeld's list—despite all this erudition and toil, there is one little angle of the subject which appears to have been overlooked. And yet it seems to me more eloquent of Goethe's originality of mind than most of what has been printed regarding his relation to music.

Rooted in awareness of pain and flux, Keats's odes of 1819 reveal the poet's desire to escape the painful actual and seek repose in beauty, in the ideal. More than any other of the odes, the implicit subject of the Ode on a Grecian Urn is the ideal itself. While the permanence of art is the poet's bulwark against flux, it is not the ultimate perfection that he seeks. Too many inner tensions, as the poem develops, shape the ideal into something much more complex, unattainable in either life or art since it encompasses both life and art. Keats's attempt to define this ideal accounts for the difficulty of the concluding lines. The purpose of this paper is to try to illuminate Keats's mode of thought and feeling as he wrote the poem and thereby, perhaps, to approach more closely his meaning.

While the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater may be found in innumerable editions, what is usually reprinted is the revised text which De Quincey prepared for a collection of his principal writings in the last years of his life. It is well known that this version of the book differs greatly from the original, and some of the differences have from time to time been pointed out; yet no one has gone to the trouble of comparing the two in any detail. The result has been some inaccurate literary history. It is important to know whether a book was written in the time of Scott and Byron or in that of Dickens and Tennyson. What is more, a comparison of the two forms of the Confessions throws a great deal of light on De Quincey's development. Only by the publication of a two-text edition could all the differences be pointed out; but since an accurate reprint of the 1822 text has recently appeared, while the revised text of 1856 is readily accessible, this hardly seems called for. Instead, I shall here confine myself to indicating the main differences between the two forms of the book—that of 45,000 words and that of 90,000.

Critics have attempted with diverse terminology and divergent points of emphasis to classify George Eliot's novels within the body of realistic fiction. She has been called a naturalist as well as a realist distinct from a naturalist; both her intent to depict the features of “the lowliest, … the least attractive person” and her inclination to shy away from “the animal” have been noted; she is cited as “the finest example extant of the thoroughgoing realism which came to be known as naturalism,” while attention is given, too, to her ability to exalt and idealize human nature and create morally uplifting examples of it in art. Undoubtedly the imprecision of our critical terminology accounts in part for the varying statements about her position. To this must be added the likelihood that critics are moved in various ways in their studies of the complex world that George Eliot describes and find in this world ample strands of evidence for whatever view they wish to emphasize. It is not the purpose at present to supply new and arbitrary definitions of “realism” and “naturalism,” nor to impose upon the reader a narrow unified view of George Eliot's work, but rather to examine the bearing of a broad and liberal trend of realism which can be observed to precede her rural novels in a body of critical discussion not often fully appreciated.

Perhaps no other French poem of recent times has been so much discussed, commented on, and analyzed as Arthur Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre. Hence it may seem presumptuous on my part to propose to the reader another lengthy discussion of a work about which “everything has been said.” If I do so, it is because of a conviction that much remains still to be said. For whereas there have been proposals for the total reading of the poem which seem to be generally acceptable, these usually fail to do more than suggest the broad general meaning; they do not provide insights into specific passages or solutions to the many difficulties of detail. Moreover, they tend to concentrate on the problem of meaning to the exclusion of the problem of structure, and it is in the problem of structure that I am especially interested. I should wish to discover, in the following pages, not only a more nearly complete reading of Le Bateau Ivre but also the answer (or part of the answer) to a theoretical question that constantly arises in the analysis of symbolist poetry. The problem simply stated is this: How much of a symbolist poem is actually involved in the central symbol about which the poem is built, and what purpose is served by such parts of the poem as are not involved in that symbol? Hence my subtitle, “The Limits of Symbolism,” which does not mean to impose limits upon the poet or to suggest that any such exist in the nature of things, but merely to inquire into the operation of these limits in the case of Le Bateau Ivre.

Writers of genius inevitably impel us to seek the sources of their inspiration. This is more than idle curiosity, for we cannot otherwise assess their originality. But when a great poet stands apparently without roots in the literary tradition of his country, the urge to ascertain the influences which moulded him becomes unusually intense. So must we explain the bias of Bécquer studies ever since the first publication of the collected Rimas in 1871. For some sixty years the debate centered almost exclusively round the question of Bécquer's debt to Heine. But other poets lurked in the background. Isolated contacts with Musset, Schiller, and Anastasius Grün were noted long ago. In 1931 the field was widened when W. S. Hendrix sought to prove that Byron, not Heine, exercised an appreciable influence on the Rimas, while in the last twenty years Spanish and Latin-American scholars have begun to investigate more thoroughly the Spanish element in his work.

Emily Dickinson's poetic vocabulary has been variously described as being “a small, rigidly compartmented vocabulary of general and conventional groups of terms, plus a moderately capacious vocabulary of homely, acute, directly felt words from which the whole actualizing strength of her verse is drawn”; as being a “large vocabulary including many rare words and some of her own manufacture”; and as being “undeniably rich, subtle, and strikingly original.” Much of the discussion of her vocabulary has been based upon the impressions of individual commentators and not upon an objective survey of her vocabulary as a whole, but the appearance in 1951 of a concordance to the poems of the Amherst poet in print at that time and the recent publication of the definitive edition of her poems that includes all of the known Dickinson material have made possible a detailed study of her entire vocabulary which furnishes a factual basis for conclusions as to her verbal habits. Such a study shows that the words on which a great deal of critical attention has been focused form only a small part of her total vocabulary and that her so-called favorite words are far from being her favorites on the basis of frequency of occurrence, findings that raise the question of whether the emphasis on those words is that of the poet or of the critics. Such a study also makes it possible to compare the Dickinson vocabulary with those of other poets and thus to determine in what ways she is unique in the words she uses and in what ways she conforms to patterns established by other poets. This discussion is based upon the results of such a study, and, in view of the comments that have been made on her vocabulary, it falls rather naturally into three parts: (1) the isolation and analysis of the more unusual words used by Dickinson, (2) the discussion of her “favorite” words, and (3) the comparison of her most frequently used words with those used most often by one hundred English poets from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. In general, it may be said that the findings show that Emily Dickinson's habits in the choice of words are similar to those of other poets and that her success or failure as a poet cannot be attributed to the use of an exotic or special vocabulary.

No section in Leaves of Grass has received so much close attention and been the center of so much discussion and controversy as “Calamus.” Friends of Whitman, particularly the “hot little prophets,” have indignantly defended the section against the charge of “indecency,” usually by raising the opposite cry, “purity,” and by citing Whitman's own saintlike, spiritual life as proof that the poems could not be unwholesome. William Sloane Kennedy calls “Calamus” “Whitman's beautiful democratic poems of friendship” and adds, “A genuine lover speaks in the Calamus pieces: a great and generous heart there pours forth its secret. Set side by side with these glowing confessions, other writings on friendship seem frigid and calculating.” At the opposite extreme is Mark Van Doren's recent judgment which has been widely influential: “His [Whitman's] democratic dogmas—of what validity are they when we consider that they base themselves upon the sentiment of ‘manly love,‘ and that manly love is neither more nor less than an abnormal and deficient love?” To the serious reader of “Calamus,” the “manly love” which recurs both as a term and an idea is of such genuine poetic complexity as to render it a good deal more than “abnormal” and considerably less than “deficient.”

When, in 1908, in answer to reviewers who dismissed Caesar and Cleopatra as opéra bouffe, Bernard Shaw prophesied to his Julius, Forbes-Robertson, “In 1920 Caesar will be a masterpiece,” he might safely have written “1950” instead. The little editorial note prefixed to the American edition of Three Plays for Puritans (1906), informing us (incorrectly) that Caesar had at that date never been produced and “perhaps could not be” (p. xl), has long since proved absurdly overmodest. Three performances within the last decade have demonstrated that in the theatre no less than in the library Shaw's unique blend of wit and insight is more keenly relished than ever. Moreover, whether or not we agree with Shaw that in Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare reversed the Circean formula and turned hogs into heroes (Works, p. xxx), we cannot deny that half a century of Hollywood “love-interest” has been sufficient to make Shaw's comedy doubly welcome as, in Sir Max Beerbohm's phrase, “a man's play.”

Readers of Joyce's Ulysses are familiar with his references to the modality of the visible and the audible as well as with the vast range and importance of the audible in the work. But commentators apparently have not seen that the key both to these references and to Joyce's use of the audible in Ulysses is Aristotle's idea of perception and modality as pondered by Stephen at the beginning of the third or “Proteus” chapter. This key opens a new door into Joyce's world of ineluctable modality and reveals the importance of the modality of the audible both in the physical world without and the stream of consciousness within. Joyce's conception of modality and his treatment of sound are closely related. His use of the audible provides one of the best illustrations of his basic concept of modality, while this idea of modality is itself the best guide to an understanding of his experimentation with the audible.

When The Grapes of Wrath was published in April of 1939 there was little likelihood of its being accepted and evaluated as a piece of fiction. Because of its nominal subject, it was too readily confused with such high-class reporting as Ruth McKenny's Industrial Valley, the WPA collection of case histories called These Are Our Lives, and Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor's An American Exodus. The merits of The Grapes of Wrath were debated as social documentation rather than fiction. In addition to incurring the disadvantages of its historical position, coming as a kind of climax to the literature of the Great Depression, Steinbeck's novel also suffered from the perennial vulnerability of all social fiction to an attack on its facts and intentions.