“A good read.” That expression is everywhere about us these days. However humble its beginnings, its incorporation into the critical lingo of the established literary press has vested it with apparent respectability. Before long, William Safire or another student of picturesque usage will comment on the origins and spurious legitimacy of this recent attachment to our linguistic arsenal. It is perhaps no accident that it was an expert on the allegory of language—and an erstwhile Californian—who introduced this designation some two years ago into the solemn deliberations of the PMLA editorial board. Unfortunately, I cannot recall the specific manuscript that incited this spontaneous and pithy assessment; but I do know that the newfound objective measure took immediate root as one of the board's many evaluative criteria. Most likely, the term fastened onto a way of perceiving and reading that we had been engaging in all along but for which no such neat tag had been readily available.

THE BALLROOM of the Chicago Marriott may strike some people as a strange place to observe cultic rituals. Yet the cultic aspect of the occasion we are celebrating this evening—the annual address of the outgoing president of the MLA—has often been noted by past speakers. Germaine Brée (1975) referred specifically to this “tribal ritual” of ours while Northrop Frye (1976) alluded more obliquely to the fate of divine kings in The Golden Bough, who vanish into limbo as axes grind ominously in the background.1 Even if our mode is merely ironic, the ritual proceeds, as Helen Vendler (1980) pointed out, according to “invisible but nonetheless inflexible conventions.”

The essay returns readers of the Roman de la rose of Guillaume de Lorris to the well of Narcissus, or the Fontaine d'Amors, and explores Guillaume's reliance on two additional Ovidian myths, those of Hermaphroditus and Attis, in his re-creation of the Narcissus setting. An examination of the evidence for Guillaume's familiarity with the two myths precedes the discussion of the contributions that the Narcissus, Hermaphroditus, and Attis myths make to Guillaume's depiction of romantic sexual love. The essay rejects the notion that Amant's fall into love represents a transcendence of Narcissus's tragedy; instead it urges that Amant himself falls into a destructive passion that has its origin in self-love.

Although critics have remarked on the connection of “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” with classical ode and hymn and have identified Mirth as one of the Graces, they have usually approached these poems as re-creative pieces and overlooked the way in which their classical form and the presence of patron goddesses influence their development and meaning. Both poems, however, follow the formula of classical ode and hymn in which a patron deity is invoked and asked for gifts proper for that deity to confer. Because Mirth is the Grace Euphrosyne and Melancholy, as I argue, is the Muse Urania, goddesses associated in antiquity and in the Renaissance with poetical inspiration, Allegro and Penseroso ask their respective goddesses for power to compose poetry. The poems unfold in turn as though the goddesses were infusing their power, Mirth inspiring a light comic vision and Melancholy an epic and tragic mood.

In Wordsworth's language a voice as enduring as epitaphic inscription interpenetrates a writing as immediate as the breath of speech. While voice might seem the appropriate linguistic ideal for a poet who saw himself as “a man speaking to men,” Wordsworth's desire for a more durable language produces a competing “insistence of the letter.” “Images of voice” in nature exist in a “strength / Of usurpation” with the written characters that nature imprints. The epitaphic text emerges as the intersection of voice and letter, in which the autobiographical subject attempts to constitute itself in textual form. Wordsworth's meeting with the blind Beggar strikingly illustrates the interpenetration of voice, self, and text. Writing, for Wordsworth, is not the death of voice but the consummation: it is the accomplishment of voice.

The frames that Lewis Carroll provided for the two Alice books have largely been ignored, when not simply dismissed, in recent Carroll criticism. Their conventional form and diction may account for this negative response, but examination of their provenance, their function within the structure of the two books, and the artistry evident in the individual frame components indicate how and why the frames are important to our understanding of Carroll's vision and purpose. The frame poems are designed to lead the reader into and away from the central dream tales through a process of lyric transformation and estrangement.

The power of novelistic tradition to translate ideological structures of belief into narrative structures that encode and perpetuate those beliefs is ominously illustrated in the Anglo-American novel's “marriage tradition.” Novelists who have attempted to escape such strictures have had to contend not only with the socially conservative thematics of the traditional love plot but also with its highly codified, closed structural variants. The protomodernist experimentation and formal openness of The Golden Bowl provides a case in point: here James methodically explodes the premises of traditional love fiction by making the novel's experiments in form mirror its unsettling critique of the sexual codes engendering marital strife. In the process, James's attempt to plot the contradictions inherent in the conventional ideal of wedlock underscores the degree to which a traditional novelistic pattern of happy endings has always been a self-subverting literary enterprise.