When our Secretary, George Winchester Stone, asked me last July to address this meeting on the general topic of language teaching and linguistics, it was only with considerable hesitation that I finally agreed to accept. There has been far too much loose talk recently about the application of linguistics to language teaching, and I did not wish to add to it. In some circles linguistics has turned into a sort of fad. There are those who talk of the “linguistic method” of language teaching, as if to oppose it to some hypothetical “non-linguistic method” used in the benighted past. And at meetings of language teachers, bright young things walk up to me and ask, apparently in all seriousness: “Excuse me, professor, but would you please tell me how linguistics handles the subjunctive?” Needless to say, I have no answers to such questions; they merely embarrass me. Linguistics is not a teaching method, but a growing body of knowledge and theory; and though it may offer helpful answers to some of the problems of language teaching, it surely does not know all the answers.

Not too many years ago if I had been told that I would be addressing this scholarly assembly on the subject of proficiency testing, I would have denied the thought as being synonymous with impeachment proceedings. I would have asserted with calculated dignity that such a subject was too pedestrian for my interests, I would have stated with just the right touch of scorn that such work was the business of social scientists, psychologists, or educationists, in short, to steal a leaf from Bill Parker's book, I would have been willing to “let George do it” or indeed would likely not have cared if it were not done at all. On the offchance that there are some among you who may still feel that same way, I ask you to let me state the case for a project which I have come to regard not only as having a claim to academic status, but one which I believe is worthy of the interest of all who would hold that testing is a proper function of teaching, and that determination of standards of performance within a subject matter field is a primary business of those who have the skills and teach the subjects which are to be evaluated.

It seems now to be generally agreed that Anglo-Saxon poetry is different from modern poetry not only in verse form and subject matter but is an entirely different kind of poetry. The basic study in the re-evaluation of Old English poetic technique is Francis P. Magoun, Jr's “Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry,” which applies to Old English poetry the discoveries of Milman Parry and Albert Lord about formulaic diction in Homeric poetry and in the oral poetry of Jugoslavia. Subsequent studies which further explore formulaic diction in Anglo-Saxon poetry are Magoun's “Bede's Story of Cædman: The Case History of an Anglo-Saxon Oral Singer” and an earlier paper of my own, “The Diction of the Signed Poems of Cynewulf.” These articles focus attention chiefly on the formula, which usually occupies the space of one verse or one measure of a verse. Professor Magoun also opened up the problem of the theme as a larger formulaic unit in “The Theme of the Beasts of Battle in Anglo-Saxon Poetry,” suggesting that the theme is essentially a convention, which the poet might call upon when he had a battle to narrate. The wolf, eagle, and raven do not advance the action: they are essentially ornament. It seems likely that such poets depended less on what moderns usually think of as inspiration than on a large stock of formulaic diction and of set pieces or themes.

The improvement of foreign language teaching in America in the past ten years under the dynamic leadership of the Foreign Language Program of the MLA is a fact in which we can all rejoice. The added impetus, financial and otherwise, provided recently by the National Defense Education Act, has made it possible for the Program, instead of retrenching after the period of Foundation endowment was ended, to expand with unprecedented vigor and effectiveness. The FLP has been active over a broad spectrum of foreign language teaching and learning, but there are areas where its influence has not yet been felt. One of these is the preparation of college and university language teachers.

To have been elected to the presidency of this great Association of men and women of good will, of knowledge, talent, and rare discrimination, constituting what is probably the biggest congeries of first-class brains in this country, is the crowning honor of any teacher's career and an awe-inspiring experience. Your president for 1960, as he prepares to vanish into oblivion after his one address in sovereign capacity, first wishes to express his gratitude to those who selected him, and his apologies for the pretentious title announced. In this country, from the beginning and throughout her entire history, action has prevailed. Yet the nation has never showed much aversion for words. Politicians, preachers, college presidents, generals, men of affairs spreading relaxation through warmed up after-dinner anecdotes, members of those faculty committees to whom, in these days of trial and error and perseverance in error, the Almighty seems to have relinquished the running of the world, all indulge their propensity for eloquence. Those whom Homer might have called the shepherds of people, in Moscow and Havana and equatorial Africa, strike back at our garrulous nation with massive retaliation. Torrents of words may flow in the sumptuous hotels where our Association once a year congregates late in December (just before the inebriating vigil through which we shall pray for a virgin year to wash out our unfulfilled promises and our harrowing regrets over unwritten articles). But your President is severely restrained by the petrifying gaze of the Executive Secretary, and prevented by tradition from falling back upon the worthiest of all themes for any academic address: the eulogy of his predecessor. His predecessor, whose steel whip sheathed in velvety skin had long guided this Association, is comfortably assured of immortality as it is. An in domitable Samson Agonistes whom no Delilah or Pamela can ever betray, he hardly needs our words of gratitude, however deeply felt, to pursue his wrestling, in Washington, with the “innumerable force of spirits armed / that durst dislike” the power of foreign languages in the dubious battle now raging on our planet.

The qualities of universality and unity in the Lazarillo de Tormes are interrelated factors through which the reader perceives and reacts to the reality presented although he does not identify himself in any way with the characters and scenes. This perception and reaction depend primarily upon three aspects of the novel: (1) the visualizing element, (2) multiple levels of humor, and (3) the unified concept of the total experience of a human being. Obviously the unknown author of the Lazarillo did not invent these characteristics, but rather fused qualities present in various literary types of his age. We shall be concerned here not with the relation of each aspect to a larger literary tradition, but with the manner in which each is utilized in the novel itself.

Plutarch de Defectu Oraculorum contains a strange story, attributed to one Epitherses, a teacher of grammar. As the ship on which he was sailing for Italy came into the shadow of Paxos, a small island in the Ionian Sea, a voice called out three times for the pilot, Thamus, an Egyptian. It commanded him to sail to Palodes, another island not far distant and there to proclaim that the Great God Pan is dead. The pilot was dubious, and finally determined that only if the sea were calm near Palodes would he obey the command. A little short of landfall the wind suddenly ceased, and all was quiet.

In spite of its language which is admittedly difficult and in spite of certain problems of literary history which beset it, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has never been considered hard to interpret as a work of art. The apparent obviousness of its genre and its combination of apparently straight-forward narrative and notable passages of description do not lead one to suspect that complicated problems of intention or meaning are lurking beneath its vivid and attractive poetry. Piers Plowman, everyone agrees, is a difficult poem and has, at least since the sixteenth century, been recognized as such. Those who are attracted to it are stimulated to probe its significance and to elucidate its mysteries. No such stimulus comes to the much larger group who enjoy and study Sir Gawain, for, although much has been written on it, it has always been con. sidered a relatively uncomplicated, beautifully organized, and masterfully presented obvious poem. Yet the more one studies Sir Gawain and ponders on its charms and organization the more one begins to wonder and speculate. Of course in one sense all literary or artistic masterpieces are miracles and occasion for wonder, but above and beyond the pleasure and surprise which come from great achievement and the feeling of perfection, some works create a peculiar sense of intellectual puzzlement as to the author's intention and tone and even on a more prosaic level as to the tie between a work and its milieu: intellectual, artistic, and social.

When Dante speaks of the “way of our life” in the first line of his poem, he is using a figure that was familiar in his day and has become a banality in ours. It is especially important in the Divine Comedy, however, for it helps set off that great work from the bizarre travel literature which preceded it in the Middle Ages, and which we have come to call the literature of “oltretomba.” Dante's journey is different, for it is not a dream and it is not his alone. It is an allegorical representation of a spiritual development: the cammino of man in this life. Dante's literary ancestor is Plato, and not Tnugdalus, and his Inferno, like Plato's cave, is the place where all men come to know themselves. St. Bonaventure was the medieval theorist who worked out the metaphor of the itinerarium mentis in great detail, but it remained for Dante to write the work which gave the metaphor substance and made great poetry from a figure of speech.

Anglo-Saxon and Greek epic each provide k. on two occasions a seemingly authentic account of the narration of verse in the heroic age. Hrothgar's court bard sings of the encounters at Finnsburg (lines 1068–1159), and improvises the tale of Beowulf's exploits in a complimentary comparison of the Geatish visitor with Sigemund (lines 871–892); Alcinous' court bard sings of the discovered adultery of Ares and Aphrodite (Odyssey vin.266–366), and takes up a tale of Odysseus while the Ithacan wanderer listens on (Odyssey vin.499–520). Nothing in all this is autobiographical : unlike the poets of Deor and Widsith, the poet of Beowulf is not concerned with his own identity; the poet of the Odyssey, reputed blind, reveals himself not at all in singing of the blind minstrel Demodocus. Since none of these glimpses of poetizing without writing is intended to incorporate a signature into the epic matter, there is prima-facie evidence that Beowulf and the Homeric poems each derive from an oral tradition. That such a tradition lies behind the Iliad and the Odyssey, at least, is hard to deny. Milman Parry rigorously defended the observation that the extant Homeric poems are largely formulaic, and was led to postulate that they could be shown entirely formulaic if the complete corpus of Greek epic survived; he further reasoned that frequent formulas in epic verse indicate oral composition, and assumed the slightly less likely corollary that oral epic is inclined towards the use of formulas. Proceeding from Parry's conclusions and adopting one of his schemata, Francis P. Magoun, Jr., argues that Beowulf likewise was created from a legacy of oral formulas inherited and extended by bards of successive generations, and the thesis is striking and compelling. Yet a fresh inspection will indicate one crucial amendment: Beowulf and the Homeric poems are not at all formulaic to the same extent.