The name of Tristan Corbière has scarcely been mentioned in manuals or in histories of French versification. His prosody has been considered neither sufficiently skillful, in the traditional sense, nor sufficiently original to be a model for imitation or an example of innovation. Most biographers and critics who have written about Corbière have mentioned, at least in passing, the peculiarities of his versification, some disapproving of the construction of his lines, and others coming to his defense. Laforgue called Corbière “cassant, concis, cinglant le vers à la cravache,” but he was highly critical of what he described as “incurable indélicatesse d'oreille” and “strophes de tout le monde.” Léon Bocquet, on the other hand, wrote that Corbière possessed “l'oreille musicienne.” That these critics are in such disagreement shows how subjective their judgments of technique are. Laforgue undoubtedly missed in Les Amours jaunes his own kind of prosody, and Bocquet, defending Corbière from the injustices of earlier critics, overstated his case.

During her lifetime Dorothy Richardson withheld all but the essential facts about herself—and gave even these grudgingly. In the years of the novelist's greatest vogue, between 1915 and 1930, when Pilgrimage was preferred by some of its readers to Proust and Joyce and was dismissed by others as unformed and insignificant, she held back the minimal biographical details which most novelists readily furnish. She listed neither place of birth nor date in Who's Who. She offered only what was known: the titles of her books and her publisher's address, and in a parenthesis her married name. It would seem that she wished to remain for her readers the author of Pilgrimage, the creator of Miriam, the historian of a woman's stream of consciousness.

With the passing years, the criticism of T. S. Eliot has lost much of the power it once had to influence the literary taste of the age. Yet one casual comment by Eliot echoes again and again through the scholarship and criticism of recent times. “In the seventeenth century,” Eliot wrote in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” “a dissociation of the sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.” Eliot was eventually to confess doubt about the cause of this dissociation, but he did note that, following Donne and Marvell, poetic feeling became cruder, until, in the eighteenth century, “The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected” (p. 248).

This article will offer an interpretation of Wuthering Heights based upon the extraordinary sadism which underlies Emily Bronte's concept of emotional relationships and indicate the significance of her preoccupation with infanticide. Unless one appreciates the importance of infanticide and sadism in Wuthering Heights, one cannot appreciate the nature of the love between Catherine and Heathcliff, a love which I believe to have been frequently misunderstood, nor can one understand the motivation behind Heathcliff's killing of his own son. My chief contention is that Wuthering Heights is basically a perverse book—I use the word without its usual pejorative connotations—and that its power is owing precisely to its perversity.

Much of the charm of Huckleberry Finn results from Twain's having tempered his satire with long, lyric descriptions of the Mississippi River, and, conversely, the bitter tone of Melville's The Confidence-Man has turned away readers because of the lack of any comparable scenic relief. “The setting Melville hit upon was the perfect one for such a book, but the setting is named or indicated rather than fully rendered. One is alleged to be on a steamboat descending the greatest of American rivers, but sensuously, pictorially, kinaesthetically, one has little or no sense of being on such a boat or such a river.” The opinion is Newton Arvin's, who credits this absence of natural description to the low ebb of “Melville's purely plastic power, his fictive and dramatic power.” According to Arvin, “the magical power of sensuous embodiment that had rendered the sea with such grandeur in Moby Dick had now failed him, all but wholly.”

The nervous, obsessional Lawrence, summoning mysterious gods, blueprinting Utopian colonies with himself at their head, and assuming the Christlike task of changing the course of modern history, tends to shut out our view of the other Lawrences. He was also, somewhat unexpectedly, a writer with a highly developed flair for comic satire.

Komm in den totgesagten park und schau:
Der schimmer ferner lachelnder gestade
Der reinen wolken unverhofites blau
Erhellt die weiher und die bunten pfade.

Dort nimm das tiefe gelb-das weiche grau
Von birken und von buchs-der wind ist lau-
Die spaten rosen welkten noch nicht ganz-
Erlese kiisse sie und flicht den kranz

Vergß auch diese lezten astern nicht-
Den purpur um die ranken wilder reben
Und auch was übrig blieb von griinem leben
Verwinde leicht im herbstlichen gesicht.

Einsamer nie als im August:
Erfüllungsstunde-im Gelande
die roten und die goldenen Brande,
doch wo ist deiner Garten Lust?

Die Seen hell, die Himmel weich,
die Acker rein und glanzen leise,
doch wo sind Sieg und Siegsbeweise
aus dem von dir vertretenen Reich?

Wo alles sich durch Gluck beweist
und tauscht den Blick und tauscht die Ringe
im Weingeruch, im Rausch der Dinge-:
dienst du dem Gegengliick, dem Geist.

In two public addresses, Gottfried Benn declared himself one of the many admirers of the famous poem by Stefan George which begins: “Komm in den totgesagten park und schau …” Upon both occasions Benn gave his audience a short resume of his reasons for liking the poem. These remarks, whatever they tell us about George, reveal something about Benn also, for the poet—as T. S. Eliot points out—is a very special kind of critic, inasmuch as he, when commenting on the work of another creator, consciously or unconsciously “is always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind that he wants to write.”

Browning is one of Shelley's main heirs in the nineteenth century. As a boy he had worshipped Shelley, who is the most obvious single influence in both Pauline (pub. 1833) and Paracelsus (pub. 1835), his earliest published works. He grew uneasy about the relationship later, but he never stopped being in important ways a poet in the tradition of Shelley. One of the enduring likenesses between them is the way both use their strong sense of the weakness of language in developing the meaning of poems. Shelley uses it most fully in Epipsyckidion, where it serves a vision of the inadequacy of all human satisfactions. His solution is to set up a number of more or less satisfactory terms, calling attention to the fact that no one of them will do, and that they all together “do” only in special ways. This corresponds in language to the tendency to resist restrictions on personal relationships that appears in the Shelleyan “harem.” The solution in both cases can be awkward, but in the case of language, at any rate, the awkwardness is part of the meaning.

Scholars have for many years been showing how responsive Walt Whitman was to the world around him and how his writings reflect his interest in the affairs and ideas of mid-nineteenth-century America. Not only are the rhythms and tones of contemporary opera and oratory incorporated in his poetic style, but so also are contemporary scientific, social, and cultural interests scattered throughout the content of his prose and the imagery of his verse. My purpose here is to show Whitman's indebtedness to the contemporary fad of animal magnetism, especially concerning its appearance in the phraseology and nature of many of his poetic images and in his conceptions of the poet and the leader.

The life of Paul Eluard holds a remarkable number of mysteries for that of a man who became prominent rather young and whose friends frequently made a particular effort to have themselves talked about. Specifically, three crises from the first period of his career, when he was attached to the surrealist movement, are either avoided or barely mentioned by biographers: the strange disappearance from Paris in 1924 which turned out to be a trip around the world; the breakup of Eluard's first marriage in 1930; and the rupture with Breton and the surrealists in 1938. Our ignorance about these questions does not stem from a lack of witnesses, but rather from the tendency of some of the poet's friends to withhold information for reasons of tact, and the tendency of others to write with such an evident bias that their testimony is unreliable. Doubtless we will soon be better informed, since every year new documents appear, and the reasons for restraint or excess become regularly less compelling.

La projection analytique d'un poème tel que Le Pont Mirabeau abstrait diverses sortes d'éléments sémantiques: tonalités affectives, attitudes, images, motifs intellectuels. Dans le cas du Pont Mirabeau, ce sont ces derniers qui peuvent fournir le plus commodément l'armature d'une analyse claire et distincte. Nous allons poser cette armature, avant de procéder à une analyse du détail. Nous aurons l'occasion de déceler et de placer les autres éléments au cours du développement.

Twenty years after its publication in 1942, Camus's short novel L'Etranger has preserved its wide appeal through its haunting intensity, strange simplicity, and virile freshness. However, the general overemphasis on the philosophical significance of the story, the failure to deal with certain literary aspects, and the obscure or ambiguous features of the novel seem to call for a new appraisal of Camus's masterpiece.

Dès sa première rencontre avec Les Séquestrés d'Altona le lecteur retrouve dans cette piece de nombreux themes sartriens tels que l'emprisonnement, l'acte ou le geste de l'intellectuel, l'authenticite et la liberte de choix. Les personnages lui sont eux aussi familiers; ce sont les freres et les sceurs d'autres personnages connus: Frantz est a la fois Oreste, Hugo et Goetz; Johanna Eve, Jessica et Estelle; Leni Electre, Olga et Ines. Neanmoins Les Sequestris d'Altona est une piece differente de toutes les autres. Dans Les Mouches ou Huis-Clos ou Les Mains sales, le probleme etait nettement delimiter la liberte fondait sur Oreste comme la foudre, ou etait refusee a Garcin ou a Hugo. Ici, le probleme ontologique de l'homme a la recherche de son identite n'est que le tremplin d'une autre recherche. Argos, le salon de style Second Empire, ou le bureau de Hoederer sont depasses, et la chambre muree de Frantz s'elargit aux dimensions de l'Histoire. Peut-etre n'est-il pas teme-raire de faire remarquer que les pieces precedentes sont, dans une certaine mesure, des illustrations de L'Etre et le neant (Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Etre et le neant, Gallimard, 1943), et pour cette raison beaucoup plus orientees vers les problemes personnels et intimes d'individus particuliers. Avec Les Sequestres d'Altona, non seulement Hambourg, ou l'Allemagne, ou les Etats-Unis, ou la Russie, ou meme l'Organisation de l'Armee Secrete comme on l'a parfois suggere, entrent en scene, mais encore l'Histoire dans sa marche inexorable, de Luther a Hitler, et pourquoi ne pas le dire, de la chute d'Adam et d'Eve jusqu'au trente-et-unieme siecle. Les Sequestres d'Altona est la premiere piece qui corresponde a la Critique de la raison dialectique, c'est-a-dire a Taction de l'Homme sur l'Histoire, et de l'Histoire sur l'Homme.

In the first pages of The Brothers Karamazov the narrator recalls that he knew a young lady of the last romantic generation who, because of insuperable obstacles to union with her lover—all of which she had invented—one stormy night threw herself off a high precipice into a deep, rapid river. By this act she was able to satisfy her desire to be like Shakespeare's Ophelia; but, the narrator adds, had the precipice been less picturesque—a fiat mud bank, for instance—the suicide most probably would not have taken place. The romantic heroine, whose fate Dostoevsky brings up here only as an aside in his attempt to explain why Adelaida Ivanovna had married Fyodor Karamazov, recalls a character type which flourished on the pages of his works in the 1840's. Every reader of Dostoev-sky's early works will remember his bookish heroes, who prefer the beautiful improbabilities of romantic novels and the fantasies of their own minds to the reality they must live in. I am thinking of such obvious examples as the hero of White Nights, who for eight years has been intimately acquainted with characters from works of Hoffman, Scott, Goethe, and Mérimée, but who does not know a single real person in St. Petersburg. I am thinking, also, of the little hero from the story of the same name, who, in the seconds before he leaps on the unridable horse Tankred, sees in his mind's eye pictures of damsels, tournaments, pages, and all the paraphernalia of chivalry. As one who prefers fantasies to reality, Golyadkin of The Double is an obvious example; but even Makar Devushkin of Dostoevsky's first published work, Poor Folk, turns his back on the miserable conditions of his daily life and plays out the role of the generous benefactor to a young girl, even though the added economic burden drives him to drink and penury. There is hardly a work in the forties that does not have its dreamer: Netochka Nezvanova, huddled in a miserable corner looking across the street to the splendid house and dreaming of an improbable life, is a summary image of the hero of the forties.