Oedipus is a man who was told he had killed his father and married his mother.He has to account for a past which is his own past, though it falls on him like somebody else's. Antigone, in order to throw a handful of earth on her brother's body, has to break the laws of the city state. She chooses a gesture which by law is punished by death. Orestes, to avenge his father, has to kill his murderers: his own mother and stepfather.

Any critic writing on Polyeucle must come to grips with a problem that is specific to this particular play (not merely generic, as the conflict between two kinds of “love-duty”). He must ask himself, “Why did Corneille, the poet of heroic humanism, choose to write about Christian martyrdom?” I do not believe it is an adequate answer to say that he did not write about Christian martyrdom but, once again, about heroic humanism. It must have been obvious to Corneille that on the one hand martyrdom had something in common with heroism and on the other that it provided a new variation on the theme. The question, then, is to identify this new variation, to determine the quiddity of Polyeucte, the special light it throws on the Cornelian glorification of man. If Corneille's theater as a whole is about idealism, its potential and its dangers, then the Christian idealism of the martyr is particular in several ways. It demands the ultimate sacrifice, which is not necessarily demanded of the secular hero. The martyr must not only risk his life, he must give it. At the same time, it promises an ultimate in glory. Thus, both the “danger” and the “potential” are extreme. It is this aspect of martyrdom that enters the dramaturgy of Polyeucte in the conflicts between the heroic Christian idealism of Polyeucte and Néarque and the various forms and levels of religious and secular idealism represented by the other characters (and Polyeucte and Néarque) at different moments of the play. But there is a related yet even more fundamental aspect of martyrdom that is built into the fabric and structure of Polyeucle. As Tertullian wrote (A pologeticus, Ch. i), “The more you mow us down, the more quickly we grow; the blood of Christians is fresh seed.” Grace, working through the example of the martyr, leads others to augment the ranks of the Christians. It is this theme of emulation that is central in Polyeucte and forms the link between the two worlds of heroic humanism and Christian martyrdom. As has often been pointed out, admiration is a key emotion in Corneille's theatre. But it is not solely an emotion the playwright hopes to evoke in the spectator; it is also a basic response of many characters to the noble and courageous actions of other characters and a response they hope to arouse in others by their own actions. Now the term admiration, the act of gazing at with wonder, can (and did at times in the Latin) imply strong approval and desire. Admiration may, as it very often does in Corneille, lead to emulation. I should like to suggest that in this theme the seventeenth-century dramatist discovered a religious analogue to the admiring imitation of a model or an ideal self-image that we find typical of so many of his secular heroes.

Malgré l'obscurité voulue, “ce poème troublant et mystérieux” (qui parut d'abord dans La Plume du ler-15 aoÛt 1903) n'est pas sans nous livrer des clefs à son interprétation. Dans l'étude qui suit nous essaierons d'apprendre ce Larron d'Apollinaire dans son propre réseau lexique, thématique et psychologique qui retient son identité. Nous tâcherons de le saisir en flagrant délit pour connaître le motif et le but de son crime. Aux fruits qu'il vole nous connaîtrons le voleur qui, par son i dentité même, justifiera son crime.

In terms of its effect on subsequent literary-theory and practice, the proposition that actions constitute the true subject of poetry is the most important aesthetic principle advanced in Laokoon. At the opening of the sixteenth chapter, Lessing attempts to derive this proposition deductively by arguing:

Doch ich will versuchen, die Sache aus ihren ersten Gründen herzuleiten.

In many respects Danlons Tod represents a radical departure from the drama of its time. Yet it, like any other work of art, is not without predecessors, nor did it arise in an intellectual vacuum. Much has been said, for example, about Lenz's influence on Biichner's view of art and on the structure and content of his dramas. Furthermore, one of the names most commonly linked with Biichner's is that of Christian Dietrich Grabbe, his contemporary. In their search for a relationship between these two iconoclastic forerunners of modern drama, most scholars turn to Grabbe's Napoleon. We know from Biichner's correspondence with Gutzkow that he was indeed acquainted with Grabbe's panoramic picture of the still present forces of the Revolution. Although he never admitted any indebtedness to Napoleon, there are nevertheless many obvious similarities linking the two plays, particularly in the mass scenes. Yet the protagonists of the two dramas have very little in common. The following study will, however, endeavor to show that there are just such important points of comparison between Danton and the protagonists of another, often unjustly neglected drama by Grabbe: Don Juan und Faust. These similarities, while themselves not conclusive proof of a direct influence of Grabbe's only “Ideendrama” on Biichner's more intellectual portrayal of the French Revolution, will show that Dantons Tod and Don Juan und Faust, as dissimilar as their subjects are, reflect a common approach to an acute intellectual problem of the time.

These words of Nietzsche say much about Gogol. They suggest his keg-like belly, the contradictions and evasions of his letters, his cunning and depth, and above all, those “ gaps and black holes in the texture of his style” which Nobokov describes in his study, in a chapter called, “Apotheosis of a Mask.” But he had other ways to hide his fragile gift—there is a certain dissimulation in the very generes he chose: his greatest comedy ends in “living statues” and he calls his novel a poema.

The introductory paragraphs of “Rappaccini's Daughter” pose an issue about understanding Hawthorne's fiction which readers are expected to resolve. Hawthorne states that he attempts only slight portrayal of “outward manners” and seeks instead to create interest by “some less obvious peculiarity” of his subject. Readers must take his stories in “precisely the proper point of view,” because from other vantage points the stories “can hardly fail to look excessively like nonsense.” Despite Hawthorne's warning that this unnamed point of view is of primary importance in reading his fiction, critics have paid little attention to the issue. Chapter headings and indexes of major critical studies of Hawthorne make no reference to point of view, and bibliographies list almost no essays on it in the journals. In this study, a brief and tentative essay in definition, I shall maintain that the point of view essential for reading Hawthorne is one of dream. Hawthorne ordinarily invokes it as a metaphor; readers see the action as what he terms a “conscious dream” (AN, p. 125). He often establishes his metaphor through use of the semblance of actual dream early in a story and heightens its effect by employing the apparition of real dream in later moments or scenes. Only rarely, however, does Hawthorne go beyond the bounds of his characteristic metaphor and cause readers to view all the events of his story as incidents in an actual dream. Hawthorne's fictional definition of the dream point of view is exact and full, his use of it imaginative and subtle. In his own phrase, from the preface to The Snow-Image, the dream mode leads readers to the center of his fiction by revelation of the “burrowing into the depths of our common nature for the purposes of psychological romance.” Hawthorne is the artist as conscious dreamer, often of dreams that turn into nightmares and bare the tragic realities of human existence.

Emerson's faith in the historic role of the hero did not prevent him from evaluating Nelson morally as a man without principle. Unfortunately, he failed to make his criticism specific; only the grouping of Nelson with Napoleon offers a clue to the origin of Emerson's disapproval. Hawthorne and Melville were more well-disposed in their appreciations, which resemble each other in extravagance of sentiment. Whereas Hawthorne's treatment takes the form of an essay, Melville incorporates Nelson into his short novel, Billy Budd, Sailor, and puts to his own uses what Hawthorne called, in Our Old Home, the “symbolic poetry” (i, 275) of Nelson's life.

The year 1960 produced a number of interesting statements in widely divergent scholarly contexts calling for a closer scrutiny of the contribution of grammar—of syntax, word order, morphology—to poetic effect. In a journal concerned largely with the teaching of English appeared Harry Warfel's contention that “the significant differences in literature lie in an author's syntactical maneuvering,” and his further suggestion that the characterization in plays, in Shakespeare's at any rate, is subtly indicated by different syntactic patterns in the speeches of the dramatis personae. In a journal devoted to aesthetics, meanwhile, Francis Utley was appealing to the linguistic concept of immediate constituents to suggest the possibility of a “tension of ambiguities” in poetry. Referring specifically to Arnold's

Certain of Donne's sermons can be fully appreciated only if we know a great deal more about their background than we usually do. The editors of his sermons have supplied brief descriptions, in many cases, of the circumstances in which the sermons were given but, except for certain obvious examples such as the Sermon of Valediction, did not have time to show how closely Donne's sermons, even those which are less celebrated, could be involved in the time and place in which they were delivered.The purpose of this paper is to call for a more serious in-depth approach to the backgrounds of many sermons by showing that such an approach can be of real value. Donne was a world made cunningly of elements in the sermons as well as the poems, and a large part of that world was his interest in the people and events around him. Often he succeeded in bringing those people and events into his art of preaching, and until his manner of doing so is examined his art goes unrecognized and one side of his complex mind will be unappreciated.

In recent years much has been made of Robinson Crusoe as an epic of economic quest and conquest—one unfortunately impeded, however, by what James Sutherland calls “boggy stretches of moralizing.” Here I will suggest that some of the major tenets of the modified Calvinistic theology articulated in those moralizings are paralleled by a series or system of traditional Christian symbols which embody that doctrine, and so I propose a reading which takes the work to be precisely what Crusoe says it is—an “allusive allegorick History,” intended originally not only to delight but also to instruct. A complete study of this kind would draw its evidence not only from The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, but also from its continuation, The Farther Adventures, and their sequel, The Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With His Vision of the Angelick World—all three volumes “Written by Himself.” Furthermore, it would orient the symbolic elements of the work within the context of Defoe's other works and of traditional Bible exegesis particularly as it was expressed in the pietistic literature of the Puritans in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This exploratory study can treat only a selection of basic images and symbols, particularly from the narrative of the first two volumes of the work itself; for their context in exegesis—and aside from occasional illustrative materials— it must presume to some extent upon the reader's familiarity with some of the main traditions of Christian symbolism and the prevailing characteristics of the varied and extensive Puritan literature of piety.

Because in the closing hours of his life Dr. Johnson was unable to conclude the task of identifying his early compositions for the Gentleman's Magazine, the early canon of his work has remained obscure; and for his share in the Debates in the Senate of Magna Lilliputia we have had to rely on Boswell, who questioned Johnson at an inopportune time, for Johnson's answer did not settle the matter: “He this year [1741], and the two following, wrote the Parliamentary Debates. He told me himself, that he was the sole composer of them for these three years only. He was not, however, precisely exact in his statement, which he mentioned from hasty recollection; for it is sufficiently evident, that his composition of them began November 19, 1740, and ended February 23, 1742–3.” The vagueness of this statement has raised two questions about Johnson's portion of the debates: (1) what are the dates, initial and terminal, of Johnson's exclusive authorship, and (2) did he write any reports which fall outside of that period, that is, when he was not “sole composer” of them? In answer to the first question G. B. Hill and, more recently, Benjamin B. Hoover have established July 1741 through March 1744 as the period in which Johnson's exclusive share of the reports was published. In partial answer to the second question, Hill attributed to Johnson two debates, from the Guthrie period (which Hoover apparently overlooked in his broad discussion of authorship); and Hoover found Johnson to have revised for Cave certain reports that first appeared in the London Magazine. Still more recently, Donald J. Greene, arguing against the terminal date, ascribed to Johnson the debate on the Removal of the Hanoverian Troops, which appeared in the magazine from May to December-Supplement, 1744. If this attribution is correct, and I believe it is, then the debates which Cave published from July 1741 to December-Supplement, 1744, were, with one un-assigned exception—the short debate on the Corporation Bill which appeared in March and April 1744—written by Johnson. The purpose of this paper is to show, by reexamining the evidence concerning four debates, that one of Hill's two attributions is wrong (on Buttons and Button-holes, 1738), that the other is correct (on the Registration of Seamen, 1741), that one of the revised London debates is in all likelihood Johnson's work (on the Navy Estimates, 1740), and that the Corporation Bill, 1744, is also from his pen, thus making the sequence unbroken from July 1741 through the 1744 Supplement.

Of all the ambiguous publications which for two centuries have muddied the waters of Sterne scholarship, none has given more trouble than a small volume which appeared in 1788 with the title Original Letters of the Late Reverend Mr. Laurence Sterne; Never Before Published. Printed at the Logographic Press and issued without a word of explanation twenty years after Sterne's death, this collection of thirty-nine letters contains material which, if it can be accepted as authentic, is of substantial importance to the biographer of Sterne. Unfortunately, the biographers have never been able to agree on its authenticity.

Students of wordsworth's criticism have long recognized that he conceived of poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. But commentators on Wordsworth often remind us that he was no aesthetic libertine. If he thought of poetry as a river of emotion, he did not wish it to become a flood; in the well-known passage from the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads of 1800, he voices the hope that “habits of meditation” have disciplined his feelings, and he declares that good poets are made such only by deep, sustained, habitual contemplation. These are commonplaces of Wordsworthian scholarship. Curiously enough, however, the full meaning of these commonplaces remains unexplored. The conjunction of thought and feeling in Wordsworth's poetic is all too readily accepted; for the most part, critics have failed to define the terms or the precise relationship between them. Yet the materials for such a definition are very much at hand. Wordsworth himself received them from John Dennis, who helped him to see that the effect of thought upon feeling is qualitative. It produces a feeling different in kind from ordinary emotion—a feeling Wordsworth came to regard as indispensable to the exercise of imaginative power.

Tennyson's In Memoriam furnishes a case study, a vexed and difficult one, in the persistence of literary tradition. Though it is not, strictly speaking, a pastoral elegy, In Memoriam yet retains unmistakable markings of the traditional form. A. J. Carr, for one, has recently insisted upon the importance of pastoral motifs “to provide the personal themes of In Memoriam with a formal structure responsive to both private instinct and the elegiac traditions.” On the other hand, others as early as A. C. Bradley and as recently as Elton Edward Smith have offered what amounts to the opposite judgment on the significance of the pastoral tradition as a key to the structure of In Memoriam. In Smith's words, “the classical elegiac conventions are observed, but not in such a way as to provide either a framework for the whole or dividing lines within the work.”

In 1949, A. Norman Jeffares declared that, although Yeats's poetry “had reblossomed in The Wild Swans at Coole [1919] and Michael Robartes and the Dancer [1921], the flowering came with The Tower” [1928]. In 1954, Richard Ellmann called The Tower and The Winding Stair “the two finest volumes” of the period 1917–33. Today, this estimate is the generally accepted one: B. Rajan has recently written, “With The Tower and The Winding Stair, Yeats's writing comes fully into its strength and words respond completely to the poem's call to order. To say that Yeats was incapable of writing a bad poem during this phase is an exaggeration, but one within the limits of critical licence.”

“ … I cannot throw away The Orators as worthless bosh,” wrote Alan Pryce-Jones. “It appears to be the work of a sane imagination without a mind—a far more complicated state than the paranoiac's working on fragments of knowledge and experience.” Such exasperation typifies the reaction of the vast majority of critics to the appearance of Auden's second book. Even the sympathetic G. W. Stonier had to confess that “With so much in this book that is fine and original, one hesitates to ask the author for more explanation. Yet that is what is needed. He works so intimately, but at such a distance. One hopes that time will bridge the gap, and that we will get nearer to him or he to us.” Unfortunately, however, since 1932 the gap between The Orators and the critic has more often widened than narrowed, critics preferring to speak vaguely about the work's significance rather than to grapple with its complex details. Richard Hoggart in 1951 and J. W. Beach in 1957 shed light on some of these details, but not until the last few years, in the writings of Justin Replogle and Monroe K. Spears, have serious attempts been made to deal with The Orators as a meaningful whole. Yet, of his own interpretation, Spears has to confess: “We can be sure that enough dark corners will remain, even if we succeed in casting light on a considerable part of its territory.”By probing some of these remaining “dark corners,” I hope to cast yet further light on Auden's most puzzling work.

ASA national meeting. The American Studies Association will hold its first independent national meeting 26–28 October in the Hotel President in Kansas City, Mo. An interesting program ranging over literature, the arts, and the social sciences has been announced. A job placement service will be conducted at the meeting by the U. S. Employment Service. ASA will continue its Joint sessions at MLA and other national meetings, but this evidence of maturity in an important cross-disciplinary area is most encouraging. We wish the meeting well. For information, write Warren French, Univ. of Missouri, Kansas City 64110. GENERAL TOPICS 6. The Bibliography Committee of GT 6 (Literature and Society) under the chairmanship of Paul J. Carter (Colorado), has sponsored the publication of a third volume in the series dealing with its topic. Literature and Society, 1961–1965: A Selective Bibliography is edited by Paul J. Carter and George K. Smart (Miami). The price is $2.50; orders should be addressed to Univ. of Miami Press, Box 8104, Coral Gables, Fla. The annual mimeographed bibliography of Literature and Society is available free to anyone interested. Write Paul J. Carter, Hellems 105 West, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder 80302.