According to ancient custom the President of the MLA on this occasion stands as Teacher before the largest class he has ever seen or ever will see. He addresses his learned scholars on some matter of common concern, common purpose, common danger. He is likely to preach a crusade to snatch the Holy Sepulchre of scholarship from the hands of the infidel. He then retires from the presidency and washes his hands of the whole business.

L'ange du Méridien“ is the first in the group of six Chartres-poems in Rilke's Neue Gedichte. It thus occupies a place of honor among the poems which make up the Chartres-cycle. Rilke always devoted much thought and care to the technical questions of the order and arrangement of the poems within his printed works. He must have felt that ”L'Ange du Méridien“ deserved to be first for specific reasons. He must have intended to give particular emphasis to it. We may assume that he meant it to serve as a kind of musical signature or prelude for the other poems of the group, to ”set the tone“ for them. A thematic analysis of the Chartres-cycle might show that, in fact, many of the basic motifs which occur in the other poems are introduced in ”L'Ange du Méridien.“

In his rewarding and influential papers entitled “Die christlichen elemente im Beowulf,” Fr. Klaeber stressed the importance of Latin Scriptural and liturgical analogues to several Old English phrases, and no one would deny that the correspondence between the two groups of expressions is frequently exact. But recent studies into the structure of the verse itself show cause for regarding the religious elements as essentially Germanic.

In the vast body of medieval literature written in what is called the Germanic area of Europe—and in the Middle Ages that included parts of present-day France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, and Poland—there is an immense amount of writing in a non-vernacular language known as Medieval Latin, in German Mittellateinisch—a term not coined by Wilhelm Meyer in 1882, as Karl Langosch claimed. It was used as early as 1838 by Jacob Grimm in the epoch-making Lateinische Gedichte des X. und XI. Jahrhunderts, prepared in collaboration with Andreas Schmeller. Mittellateinisch, among other things the medium of the Roman Catholic Church, is a language apart, growing not directly out of that of Cicero and Vergil, but rather originating from the late Latinity of Antiquity in its dying stages, and under the influence of tendencies present in the vernacular tongues.

Students of The Canterbury Tales have devoted relatively slight attention to the incident of the Canon at Boughton under Blee and to his Yeoman's tale, and even of this they have not given much to the Canon himself. H. G. Richardson and J. M. Manly investigated possible historical models for him, and Marie P. Hamilton has shown that he was a Canon Regular. But apart from these, discussion has been confined mainly to the sources and extent of Chaucer's alchemical knowledge, the possible audience for the tale considered apart from the Canterbury group, and the character of the Yeoman, so much more fully developed than that of his master.

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused.
Hamlet

Discussions of Hamlet's “To be or not to be” soliloquy are almost as varied and divergent as interpretations of the play itself.1 Different understandings of the play and different formulations of Hamlet's character naturally affect interpretations of the soliloquy, but interpretations which fail to consider the dramatic context of the speech are surely faulty in critical procedure. Unfortunately, most discussions of the passage overlook or minimize the relevance of the surrounding action to it, an error that may then lead to problems of coherent or thorough analysis of meaning. The fault of ignoring the dramatic context, for example, may be seen in G. Wilson Knight's approach to the speech in “Hamlet Reconsidered”:

For almost two centuries the nature and significance of Samuel Johnson's work in the translation of Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia have been obscured. Both James Boswell and Sir John Hawkins denied that any traces of Johnson's style exist in the translation, and, following their lead, most scholars have been willing to accept at face value Johnson's explanation of what he had done:

Modern critics have stressed the element of paradox in Herbert's work. Herbert is homely, as has commonly been remarked, yet he is sophisticated. He appears spontaneous, yet his poems are scrupulously well-constructed. He is unsure of his union with God, yet he is sure. He doubts himself and he does not doubt. He seems to sing, and he seems to speak. Any new technical analysis of Herbert's verse should take these paradoxes, and the syntheses forged from them, into account. The present paper attempts to do so by isolating, in metrical terms, the apparently irreconcilable modes of “song” and “speech” which have been observed in Herbert by several critics, notably Joseph H. Summers; by discovering what conventions they derive from and how Herbert used and changed what he learned from others; and by showing how the prosodic causes serve as instruments of an overall poetic vision in The Temple. It will follow the division of theory, between the poet's song and his speech, although it should be remembered that Herbert himself made no such division. His most typical work contains both elements. Together they form his style.

In the middle of Book XIV, the last book of The Prelude, Wordsworth indicates, rather belatedly, that the poem has two themes:

Imagination having been our theme,
So also hath that intellectual Love.

My purpose in this paper is to examine this secondary theme of The Prelude. It is a theme that, under the name of benevolence, has been treated fairly adequately without reference to The Prelude by George W. Meyer in Wordsworth's Formative Years (1943). But unless I am seriously mistaken, no one has recognized, first, the content Wordsworth gives to the term or, second, the place he gives to the theme in the structure of The Prelude.

A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers contains a great many quotations, and these have been criticized as disturbing by those who find the work not much more than an interesting journal gone wrong. Even to those fond of the book it is clear that A Week has too many of them, and that occasionally so many are bunched together that the reader loses the sense of Thoreau's personality, which is always unfortunate. But the quotations with which A Week is studded, while certainly bothersome now and then, are usually pleasurable if one reads slowly, watching for the special powers and idiosyncrasies of the older styles which Thoreau loved. The contrast between his examples and the timbre of his own prose is satisfying in itself and contributes to the major concern of the whole work—the mind's proper fluidity, its rich diversity of attention when most in harmony with the spiritual laws governing insight and inspiration.

Ever since the first appearance of Madame Bovary, Flaubert's concept of the novel has occasioned so many and such persistent misunderstandings that it seems well, now that a century or more has elapsed, to seek once again to understand what he did conceive the novel to be. Flaubert made numerous, isolated statements on the subject throughout his life, but these are scattered and in a sense always random, related only to the particular aspect of general theory which happened at the moment to be attracting his attention. It has even been urged that these should not and cannot be used to establish his concept of the novel. Moreover he did state that he execrated what was called realism; and he had no greater use for any of the other schools of his day, naturalism or impressionism or even those which baptized him their “chef d'école.”

“Arnould wrote the cleverest, gratefullest verse-thanks to me, the other day, for these lyrics of mine,” Robert Browning told Alfred Domett in a letter of 1842, “and brought you in so happily.” Joseph Arnould himself, writing Domett some months later, spoke disparagingly of his epistle as “very schoolboy verses.” Though they had said exactly what he had felt at the time and still felt about the beauty and power of Browning's recent poetry, Arnould could not help fancying that his lines had given Browning “a bad opinion of my sincerity.” Arnould does less than justice to his verse critique. He is sincere to the point of much tactful admonishment, and though his tone is ingenuous and his style colorful rather than polished, he is selective and informed in many of his judgments. The epistle tells us much about this cultivated friend, and it suggests still more about the intellectual environment in which Browning worked during the early 1840's while he was trying to write dramas for the stage and at the same time feeling his way toward his special subject and manner. That Browning himself valued Arnould's epistle is shown by his giving it (perhaps along with other poems) to Elizabeth Barrett; for on 1 May 1846 Elizabeth wrote: “I am delighted with the verses and quite surprised by Mr. Arnould's, having expected to find nothing but love and law in them, and really, there is a great deal besides. Hard to believe, it was, that a university prize poet (who was not Tennyson) could write such good verses.” F. G. Kenyon, when he was collecting Browning's letters to Domett for Robert Browning and Alfred Domett (1906), a book that also contains letters and excerpts from letters of Arnould to Domett, seems to have had no knowledge of the whereabouts of the verse epistle. Fortunately the manuscript of this piece, together with the accompanying letter and six additional letters of Arnould's to Browning written in the years 1846–50, has recently come into the possession of Gordon N. Ray, President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Mr. Ray has kindly made them available for reproduction here.

Despite Mark Twain's prefatory disclaimer of any pretense to historical accuracy, a number of early reviewers of A Connecticut Yankee saw it as fundamentally historical and consequently “a very irrational proceeding.” William Thomas Stead, who read the Yankee with sympathetic insight and thought it a highly significant novel, conceded that it contained “much strange misreading of history.” And Andrew Lang, in a spirited defense of Mark Twain against his English detractors, admitted that he had not read the Yankee because its author did not have “the knowledge which would enable him to be a sound critic of the Middle Ages.”

Little is known of Malraux's life before his Indochina adventure in 1924. Most scholars dismiss his activities during this early period with the brief statement that he worked “in the art department of the publisher Kra,” or that he was “editor of their literary series called ‘Editions du Sagittaire’.” This lack of interest is partly due to the absence of much concrete information, Malraux being particularly reluctant to discuss what he calls his “vie privée.” Even more important, however, is the fact that most critics have never considered a knowledge of his publishing career to be very important for an understanding of his literary formation. This position hardly seems justified when one considers that publishing has always been a major interest of Malraux, particularly during the period preceding La Condition humaine. Since his work at Kra was in the nature of an initiation into this field, it is of considerable significance and deserves more attention than it has previously received.

In 1943 Friedrich Beissner published the first volume of his critical edition of Hölderlin's works. This, together with the appearance of succeeding volumes, has reawakened interest in the problems that the poet's verse raises. Basic articles on text critical methodology and numerous reviews of the Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe have taken positions with regard to Wilhelm Hoffmann's claim that Beissner's edition represents “einen gereinigten, endgültigen und vollständigen Hölderlin-Text ..., den es bisher nicht gibt.” In this critical literature, now distributed over a round two decades, three main positions may be distinguished:—

(1) Enthusiastic and largely uncritical approbation has come from writers who have eagerly awaited the appearance of further volumes of the edition. These writers are in basic agreement with Hoffmann's above-cited claim. Emil Staiger describes the edition as “das größte philologische Meisterwerk, das die deutsche Literaturwissenschaft bis zum heutigen Tag zu verzeichnen hat, epochemachend in dem neuartigen Aufbau des kritischen Apparates, ... ” It is, according to Ernst Müller, a document of Beissner's ability to decipher “arg verdorbene, oftmals überschriebene und in scheinbar willkürlich zerstreutem Zustand vorhandene Manuskripte mit dem geschulten Auge des Philologen auf ihren Wort- und Silbenbestand hin. ... ” Manfred Windfuhr classifies Beissner's work as “der erste gelungene Versuch, das Werden der Dichtung Stufe um Stufe fortschreitend aufzuhellen, den Linien der Entstehung anschaulich zu folgen.” Lothar Kempter sees the justification of Beissner's edition as against the editions of Hellingrath and Zinkernagel first of all in the relative completeness of Beissner's contribution: “Jede Auswahl, nicht nur des endgültigen Wortlautes, sondern auch der Vorstufen, bevormundet den Betrachter. Einzig die in jeder Hinsicht vollständige Ausgabe schenkt ihm die Freiheit der eigenen Entscheidung.”

It will be in Chicago, with headquarters at the Palmer House, on 27, 28, and 29 December. Members who wish to submit papers, with a view to places on the official Program, should communicate at once with the chairman of the appropriate Group or Section (not with the Secretary of the Association). Following the title of each Group or Section, the first name (italicized) is that of the 1965 Chairman, who must have his complete program in the hands of the editor on or before Wednesday, 22 September 1965; the second name is that of the 1965 Secretary, who, in most cases, will presumably become the 1966 Chairman, and whose name is given in case members may be interested in preparing papers for the 1966 meeting. See “For Members Only” in this issue, p. A-10, for the announcement of any topics for the 1965 Groups or Sections of which we have to date been informed.