ALTHOUGH NATURE and art are no doubt here to stay, the nineteenth century has for some time now been getting on in years. In the lead article in this issue, Carl Woodring is concerned with all three—art, nature, and the nineteenth century—but from the perspective of our own decade, writing the kind of literary history that attempts, at least in part, to see ourselves as others have not yet seen us. Recognizing that “the road we are trying to repair passed through nineteenth-century travail,” Woodring relates current attitudes to nineteenth-century concerns with ai t and nature, concluding that today both Wordsworth's environmentalism and the selfsufficiency of Oscar Wilde are still alive. Woodring is by no means the first to ponder such matters, but the range and lucidity of his recapitulation make the essay valuable to specialist and nonspecialist alike; we all have a vested interest in art and nature and all come trailing at least some clouds of glory from the preceding century. The essay has energy and philosophic insight in large measure, and abundant instances of Woodring's wit (“In their ignorance and folly, the Romantics missed a great opportunity to be as miserable as we are”).

The polarities of the nineteenth century, from the glorification of nature to art for art’s sake, with an intervening positivism, bear upon our own time. Because civilization had driven nature from the individual, the Romantics sought reunion, through the imagination, with perceptible external forms. Photography, accompanying the simpler doctrines of realism and positivism, relieved the imagination of the burden of creating a world external to the mind. Darwin, by demonstrating that nature works by accident, displaced Wordsworth’s affective version of the Deists’ universe fitted to human needs. Naturalism and the replacement of nature by art rose together. Today the environmentalism of Wordsworth and the self-sufficiency of Wilde are each half alive.

While recent scholarly attention to the medieval aspects of Troilus and Criseyde has overshadowed the older custom of critics to associate it with modern fiction, its kinship with such later literature is authentic. The poem’s plentiful medieval materials—for which Chaucer draws extensively on Dante, Machaut, and Boethius—invite interpretation of it in terms of traditional modes: the epic, the romance, and the philosophical demonstration. Chaucer, however, completely undercuts the usual effects of these modes with irony, at the same time employing the elements and techniques of realism. The irony cooperates with the realism to make a work that finally is like modern fiction in identifying the essentially human through the particularity of its presentation.

The association of ideas as manifested in Shakespeare’s image clusters, discussed by Caroline Spurgeon and Edward Armstrong, was used by R. W. Chambers as a test of authorship for the Sir Thomas More fragment. Some unstudied associations tie Iago to one side of Shylock and the More fragment to another, providing further evidence of Shakespeare’s authorship and the probable date of composition. Image clusters similarly suggest that King John preceded Richard II; and King Lear, Timon of Athens. Our consideration needs to be broadened beyond exclusively verbal terms: Shakespeare’s imagination is fully theatrical. Association is not a mere stimulus-response limiting of the imagination; it provided flexible and wide-ranging systems of intermeshing concepts at Shakespeare’s most creative moments.

Although Milton wrote extensively on poetics, we cannot get his views by simply piecing together his scattered statements; they changed and developed to the end of his writing life. But central from early to late years were questions of the poet’s inspiration, relation to his audience, and possible usefulness. Perhaps the core of his poetics is best described by the Greek word paideia; for however distinctively Christian, Milton was too thoroughly the heir of humanism to disavow classical teaching and Renaissance commentary on poetics. Still, only his final poems in their implications can suggest his final theory.

During 1721, when a violent plague raged around Marseilles, concern in England focused not so much on the nature of the disease as on problems of civil order, particularly among the London poor. But in his Journal of the Plague Year (1722), an account of the plague of 1665, Defoe’s compassion for the poor extended to a sympathetic account of their spirit of rebellion. Defoe’s work compares the sufferings of the past and the potential agonies of a new plague, but reflects also the mental despair caused by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble during 1721. Yet Defoe’s fictional account celebrates the past and future triumph of London through the compassion of its citizens. In making history as much prophecy as a reflection of the past, Defoe also created the first realistic fiction with a narrator sympathetic to both victim and survivor, common sufferers trapped by forces beyond human control.

Though at present it is critically unfashionable to view the early Auden as part of a literary group, during the thirties Auden and a number of his friends considered themselves intimately bound by personal, literary, and political ties. The notion of a group plays an extraordinarily important role in Auden’s early poetry. The underlying sociopolitical structure of The Orators is that of the group—much of its considerable obscurity is attributable to this fact and to the related circumstance that its primary audience was the Auden group. Two keys to understanding The Orators, namely its foundation on the psychological “theories” of Homer Lane and on the anthropological research of John Layard, were provided only years later by Auden’s friends, Isherwood and Spender. Moreover, its emphasis on groups has an important political significance which has often led to its being considered a quasi-Fascist work, not least by Auden himself.

Although much comment on Beckett’s prose from How It Is (1961) through The Lost Ones (1970) has appeared, uncertainty as to the artistic intent of this innovative fiction has hindered definitive analysis. An understanding of the pieces as further developments of the Beckettian hero’s progressive withdrawal from an absurd macrocosm and descent toward the ever-receding core of the microcosmic self not only defines meaning in each piece but also reveals a thematic unity binding these works together and to the earlier fiction. Trapped in the mind but unable to escape a suffering awareness of the outer world, the figures portrayed undergo Beckett’s own particular brand of crucifying self-perception.

The pronouns I and you, together with several other “shifters,” do not have a referential function in language. Many of the questions we ask (and fail to answer) about lyric poetry arise out of inadmissable translations of I and you into referential forms. Buber’s myth of a primal I-Thou relation gives us a guide to a reading of I and you in Achterberg’s “Ballade” in such a preferential way, I seeking to recover the lost relation by calling You into being through poetic-magical activity. Here the quest of I, however, culminates in confrontation with “the hole,” the void from which comes the Logos. While the nominal theme of the poem is the failure of the poetic-creative self to bring back the Logos, its secret theme is that poesis-as-activity can cause the continual coming-into-being of the Logos and the lost You. (The essay includes a translation of Achterberg’s poem.)

Audience participation in theater often obscures or confuses the magical nature of the activity of theater. The uniqueness of this activity is centered in the separateness of the world of the play from the world of the audience, as Stanley Cavell remarks. The importance of such separateness becomes vivid in recognition scenes which are the structural core of most drama. Aristotle perceives the importance of recognition scenes, but does not show adequately what such scenes do to the spectator. The recognition scenes in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s King Lear reveal drama’s special ability to allow the spectator to acknowledge another while himself remaining private. The critical process involved in coming to such an understanding of drama, while similar to some elements of structuralistic analysis, focuses more directly on a concern with the patterns of relationship between play and audience. My methodology corresponds to Stanley Fish’s “affective” stylistics.