A dramatic necessity goes deep into the nature of the sentence. Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination. This is all that can save poetry from sing-song, all that can save prose from itself.—Robert Frost, Foreword to A Way Out (1917)

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.”

Three consecutive episodes in Joyce's Ulysses—the “Oxen of the Sun,” “Circe,” and “Eumaeus”—are related by parodie technique. There is considerable overlapping in the methods of the three sections, since all three utilize the familiar and the well worn; but they differ in the chief matter selected for parody. The “Oxen of the Sun” or hospital episode is a parodie résumé, in chronological order, of distinctive English literary styles, such as those of Malory and Carlyle, or, where no specific author is parodied, of period mannerisms. The “Circe” or brothel episode collects and parodies the proverb and the cliché. The “Eumaeus” or homecoming episode parodies that variety of long-winded journalese which relies on elegant variation, circumlocution, dead metaphor, and stock expression and makes twenty trite “fine” words do the work of two plain ones. Models for all three episodes can be found in the work of Jonathan Swift. Swift's parodies of literary styles are best exemplified in A Tale of a Tub; his parodie use of the proverb in Polite Conversation; and his ridicule of the trite in A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind. It is my belief that Joyce profits from Swiftian practice in all three episodes; but his use of Swift is most easily demonstrable in the “Circe” scene, which makes direct use of Polite Conversation.

William Faulkner's novel The Hamlet has received less critical attention and, perhaps, less critical intelligence than any other of his major works. The reasons for this neglect are rather easily stated. Published in 1940, Faulkner's only significant novel between Absalom, Absalom! in 1936 and Go Down, Moses in 1942, The Hamlet differs considerably from the novels of the “major phase,” 1929–1936. It comes at a point in the development of the Yoknapatawpha Cycle when the early conflict between legend and reality which so disturbed Quentin Compson had been largely resolved, and it is concerned with themes that had earlier been of peripheral interest. It presents as protagonists a class of Yoknapatawphans who are relative newcomers to the cycle. These things together—the lessening of tension and the utilization of new material—are reflected in the unique tone of The Hamlet, which led Malcolm Cowley to entitle his review of the novel “Faulkner By Daylight.” Further, since the novel is leisurely in its narrative method and relatively lucid in its style, it does not at first glance seem to demand or merit the sort of exhaustive readings which have been given, say, to The Sound and the Fury. Finally, with the major exception of Robert Penn Warren, almost none of the critics has been willing to recognize the book as a novel at all. Cowley speaks of its structure as that of “beads on a string.” John Arthos calls the book Faulkner's “most remarkable writing” but adds that it “falls into at least four separate stories… there is no real unity.” O'Connor, Howe, Campbell and Foster have all dealt with and appreciated various aspects of the novel but it remains the chief enigma of the cycle.

En el sistema de símbolos en la obra de Federico García Lorca, aparece el de la luna como el de mayor significación por su variedad de manifestaciones, su vinculación a algunos otros de sus símbolos centrales, la función estructural que desempeña en un gran número de sus poemas y en algunos de sus dramas, y la conformación arquetípica y semántica que presta al ámbito de su mundo poético. Su incorporación desde un principio en la obra del poeta y su evolución a través de ella, nos indica, además, el área extensa y soterraña de su mundo afectivo, al mismo tiempo que nos sitúa frente a una visión específica del universo y del destino del hombre en este mundo. Trataremos en el presente estudio de fijar su particular configuración en esta poesía y de examinar su delimitación dentro de la tradición literaria y determinadas áreas culturales que han podido contribuir a su constitución característica.

T. S. Eliot's most recent play, The Confidential Clerk, received short shrift in New York after triumphs in Edinburgh andLondon.lt would be too much perhaps to say that the play was “snuffed out by the reviews,” but it certainly came up against as unsympathetic a row of reviewers as any great dramatist has had to face. A leading journalistic critic wrote that The Confidential Clerk “represents a deliberate attempt to be ordinary. Unfortunately, Eliot has succeeded.” When he indicated in a lecture at Harvard University several years ago that, like Shakespeare, he hoped gradually to reduce dramatic verse to the level of colloquial speech before attempting elaborate embroidery of it, Eliot could not have expected his words to fly back in his face in precisely this way. Mrs. Guzzard's ringing lines seem especially apropos here: “Wishes, when realized, sometimes turn / Against those who have made them.” At any rate the apparently simple language (some have called it “unpoetic”) and farcical plot devices of the new play seem to have turned aside extensive serious critical consideration. For a play that comes to grips so forcibly with such compelling issues as the spiritual loneliness and inarticulateness of modern men and women, freedom of the will and predestination, cultural integration, and the place of the arts in life, it has been curiously underrated. The Confidential Clerk, while closely linked with Eliot's previous plays, is in so many ways a new departure as to reward close study. As a matter of fact, much of its poignancy and plangency eludes one when the play is viewed for the first time merely as a stage piece. Probably no other play of Eliot's calls for such total immersion.

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.

Efforts to establish the identity of Morgan Odoherty, the Irish adjutant whose coruscating wit shone so brightly from the early pages of William Blackwood's Maga, have for years proved fascinating but frustrating scholarly exercises. Some years ago, in PMLA (lviii, Sept. 1943, 716–727), Ralph Wardle posed the question “Who Was Morgan Odoherty?” and then supplied an accurate but incomplete answer. After meticulously sifting a mass of contradictory evidence, Wardle came to the conclusion that Odoherty was not William Maginn, as generally assumed, but was rather “the embodiment of the Irishness in several men's minds—and most of them were dyed-in-the-wool Scots.” On the strength of a statement by David Macbeth Moir's biographer that Moir's contributions to Blackwood's Magazine included “familiar letters and rhyming epistles from Odoherty; mockheroic specimens of translations from Horace; Christmas carols by the fancy contributors, Mullion and the rest; ironical imitations of living poets; Cockney love-songs; puns and parodies,” Wardle knew that Moir “took his turn as Odoherty.” Exactly which contributions were Moir's, though, he could only conjecture.

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.

The following Bibliography marks a departure in MLA bibliographical service to its members. From 1919 to 1956 the Annual Bibliography was limited to American writers of books and articles in the field of the modern languages. The MLA Executive Council in February 1955 authorized the cessation of a strictly American bibliography and the inauguration of one which would gradually become international in scope. The following compilation is the initial attempt of the Association to provide this wider scope.

I am personally grateful to Archibald A. Hill's experimental analysis of “The Windhover” in the December 1955 PMLA (LXX, 968–978) for the incidental enrichment of the poem offered by a fact I had not previously recognized–the fact that “dawn-drawn” may be read ‘sketched by the dawn’ as well as ‘attracted by the dawn.’ I must therefore confess myself disappointed by his flat denial of the enrichment he has offered. Mr. Hill says: “I see no way to tell whether the best substitute for ‘drawn’ is ‘attracted’ or ‘sketched.‘ The individual reader can make his own arbitrary choice, but I believe that he must choose, and can not keep both meanings. There are instances in this poem where multiple meanings must be recognized, but these occur only when there is positive evidence for more than one interpretation. Multiple meaning is not acceptable when there is merely a choice between two meanings which are both formally and structurally satisfactory” (p. 971).