We have recently been growing more aware of the differences between oral cultures and literate cultures. The effects on modes of thought inherent in the successive media of expression—oral speech, analphabetic writing, alphabetic writing, letterpress printing, the electronic media, wired and wireless—have been studied in some detail, and we know something of the effect of (alphabetic) writing on the ability to perform abstract analysis and to exercise individually controlled thinking as against communally controlled thinking.

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.

Many people on occasion prefer a textual error to an authentic reading. One mistake by a compositor of Melville's White-Jacket—setting “soiled fish of the sea” instead of “coiled fish of the sea”—achieved an adventitious fame some years ago. Various readers have since declared themselves in favor of the error, on the grounds that “soiled fish” makes a richer, more interesting passage than the ordinary “coiled fish of the sea.” In short, the error seems to them to create a better work.

The scene, a coffee table in the faculty lounge. Seated casually in postures perfected through years in academia are three obviously very full professors of English. The topic is A—the departmental meeting on promotions. One of the group is speaking earnestly. “But we've got to have another medievalist, Quincy. You admit that.” “Of course I admit it, Arthur,” replies a second, “but unless we promote Muddleton, we'll lose him, and where will we be in contemporary literature?” “Couldn't care less,” reflects the medieval scholar, but nods his head as if agreeing. “I hate to bring this up again, gentlemen,” interrupts the third, who by his well-thumbed appointment book and downcast expression is manifestly the chairman, “but we keep passing by Clerkson.”

This yeats Centennial Year will witness the publication of widespread comment and encomium, “as though,” in Yeats's own words, “it were firmly established that the dead delight in anniversaries.” Now, as his first century joins its circle, Yeats is securely one of the “passionate dead,” who are, in his version of Ben Jonson's line, “So rammed with life they can but grow in life with being.” “Under Ben Bulben,” the elegiac poem which ends with Yeats's epitaph, written only a few months before he died in 1939, says of grave diggers

They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.

When the grave diggers had thrust Yeats back in the human mind, T. S. Eliot in a memorial lecture in 1940 called him “the greatest poet of our time—certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.” Few have contradicted this evaluation. The mass of biography, criticism, exegesis in the years since Yeats died has grown so enormously that his poetry has at times seemed to face the fate he thought the human imagination had suffered in the nineteenth century, that of being “laid in a great tomb of criticism.” In his Centennial Year scholars might most profitably concern themselves not with the mounting tomb of criticism but rather with the texts of Yeats's works and the tools for study which the quarter century since his death has produced.

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.“

Captain Ahab's pursuit of Moby-Dick and the crocodile's pursuit of Captain Hook have attained almost mythic stature. Nearly everyone, from nursery child to scholar, has heard of the Great White Whale and of the Ticking Crocodile. Each aquatic monster has swallowed the amputated limb of a dark and terrible captain. Each captain has replaced his limb with an unusual but useful prosthetic device. Each brooding victim is at last destroyed by his nemesis after a relentless oceanic quest.

To the uninitiated the name of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu may arouse amusement or disbelief. Why so long and mouth-filling a name? Before her marriage she was Lady Mary Pierrepont; she owed her title to her father, who was a peer with the successive ranks of Earl, Marquess, and Duke. Her husband was Edward Wortley Montagu, Esquire; and while she remained Lady, he remained untitled. In her own day there were other peers' daughters named Lady Mary, but her intellectual brilliance and her connection with Alexander Pope and his circle gave her the dubious honor of being recognized in print as the Lady Mary.

When C. P. Snow delivered his famous Rede Lecture at Cambridge in 1959, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” few of us who were present in the Senate House foresaw the acclaim his paper was going to receive. I remember measuring its reception from the assembled company of good gray dons and a few visitors as cool, if not hostile, but the commonplaces that Lord Snow uttered that day were uttered with a pungency and timeliness and force that made them seem fresh, and we have come to look upon them as one of the most penetrating diagnoses of our age that has yet been made.

No wonder students of Middle English literature are concentrating on systems of exegesis, symbolism, spiritual and liturgical exercise. These traditional lores convey ideas, and it is the ideas in medieval poetic works that often seem most valuable. Everywhere abound explicit propositions and exhortations: society is corrupt, man is fate's victim, bend your will to God's. Implicit notions about destiny, justice, and will seem to move behind veils of narrative and description, even to stir within the verbal devices adorning these veils. When routed out of poetic works, such ideas seem fully comprehensible; in fact, they do not differ essentially from those to be found in works of theology, philosophy, and homily, and they seem shaped by the same tools of rhetoric and dialectic. No wonder people are more intrigued by these pearls than by the oysters in which they live.

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.

Victor Hugo, le poète le plus éminent de son époque, était aussi un des romanciers les plus en vue de la jeune école romantique. Auteur dramatique, la richesse et la fécondité de son imagination étaient renommées. Sa réputation de penseur et d'artiste était grande. De moindres personnages eussent été satisfaits. Pas Hugo. Son ambition convoitait une réputation d'érudit. La parution de Notre-Dame de Paris en 1831 lui permit d'ajouter cette nouvelle fleur à sa couronne.

As teachers of language and literature, you have all noticed that my title is even more ambiguous than most. Those of you who are amiably disposed may even have called it general, in the old style, rather than ambiguous, in the new. The word “rhetoric” has for a long time served for both the study of the art of persuasion and for the art itself; Aristotle's Rhetoric, upper-case, is still unsurpassed, but take away the capital letter and Aristotle's rhetoric is often very bad indeed, at least as we view it. In the second sense rhetoric has never had a real quantitative revival because it has always thrived; but in the first sense we seem to be in the midst of a revival of rhetoric unmatched in the twentieth century. Unfortunately, in spite of some very good work, there are signs that it may prove a very shoddy revival indeed, with no more lasting effect than the rhetorically-oriented “communications” movement of a decade ago, unless we take thought about what we are doing. Judging from some of the recent freshman texts I have seen, I would not be surprised to find in my box tomorrow when I return a new work entitled A Speller's Rhetoric.

When a monumental new edition of Billy Budd appeared in 1962, it was the hope of the editors that their exhaustive scholarship might contribute to a definitive interpretation of the novel. Such a wish might seem unnecessarily restrictive, but the extreme critical divergence on Billy Budd has created a genuine threat to its artistic integrity as a result of its apparent failure to support a demonstrable reading. This essay is an attempt to end the war, or to make the end more predictable.

The Masque, or serenata, or pastoral opera, Acis and Galatea—in eighteenth-century printings it was indifferently categorized—has been not so much neglected as quite ignored by the biographers and critics of John Gay. In its entirety, words and music, it is a masterpiece, and the reasons for its lying unregarded, except by historians of music, deserve to be scrutinized because they signalize a recurrent failing on the part of those who write on the arts, when a work exists simultaneously in more than one medium. Only lately, in truth, has criticism begun to cope with Shakespeare himself as drama existent in and for living embodiment on a physical stage and nowhere else, not even in the mind of Coleridge. (Theatrical criticism is by habit only piecemeal commentary on separate productions.) Similarly, to set small matters beside great ones, only of late has the ballad of tradition begun to be considered as song and not as a literary or pseudo-literary genre, sufficient and self-sustaining in its text alone. And the bardic tradition of the Ugo-Slavs is teaching us much about the Homeric epics of which former generations were unaware. Signs, in fact, are here and there beginning to appear of an unwillingness to rest content with the one-dimensional conception of arts which are only half-fulfilled until they are realized in two dimensions or more. A drawing of a sculpture is not enough; a sculpture of an action is not enough; pantomime does not suffice the spoken scene; the verbal text of a musical scena will not satisfy. Nor can any of these be adequately criticized on a basis of missing dimensions.

Your Executive Secretary has asked me to discuss a particular aspect of our recent efforts involving the schools. The question, specifically, is why are scientists willing to spend large parts of their short lives outside their lovely ivory towers, trying to help the schools to help themselves. Surely it might be, but is not, only an excess of missionary zeal. Nor is it that science itself is getting too difficult or too precious, though sometimes we have our moments of depression, when we believe that science is moving away from the concerns of people. Of course, it is not. No, in our ivory towers it is still true that a molecule may not talk but it never talks back; moreover, its feelings are never hurt, and it never does one thing because you ask it to do another. Ask a molecule a sensible question, and you will get a sensible answer.