DespuéS de cuidadosas y repetidas lecturas de la Antolojía Poética, me he detenido en uno de sus poemas por parecerme que, sometiéndolo a ceñido análisis, podría contribuir a un mejor entendimiento del espíritu poético de Juan Ramón Jiménez. Me refiero al poema n 50, colocado en el grupo IV de la Antolojía con el título general de “Pastorales,” de los años 1903–05:

Lionel trilling has remarked that “Arnold the poet first saw the problems Arnold the practical man tried to solve.” Arnold the poet, however, also saw the solutions to the problems that he posed, and the poet chiefly differs from the moralist in his greater sympathy for the perplexed man of his generation (a sympathy doubtless born of Arnold's own experience with “the damned times” in which he found himself). It is obvious enough that the essays are marked by an assurance in the face of mid-nineteenth-century anarchy which is generally lacking from the earlier poetry. Whether or not this assurance is adopted for the occasion, it seems probable that the reason for it was Arnold's growing conviction that the poetic record of a personal struggle (and even of a personal victory) was an inadequate contribution to his age.

It has frequently been assumed that Keats, in revising the earlier version of Hyperion into The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, was liberating himself from the influence of Milton and, especially, of Paradise Lost. In the new induction to The Fall he abandoned the epic structure of the first Hyperion for a form that is both more personal and allegoric—that of a vision or dream. The change is sweeping, involving not only structure but style, and apparently reflects the poet's dissatisfaction with the epic nature of the earlier version. Valid reasons for that dissatisfaction are not difficult to find. The first two books of Hyperion, with their description of the fallen divinities and their conclave, in general parallel the action of the first two books of Paradise Lost. Whereas Milton in his opening books gradually introduces his main subject, the fall of man, Keats suddenly presents, in his third, the deification of the poet, Apollo, through an imaginative and supremely intense realization of human destiny and its suffering. That vision is largely subjective and personal and represents Keats's groping toward a new and more mature conception of tragic beauty, the relevance of which to the epic events that precede it is not, and perhaps never could have been, made clear. Nor is it apparent how he could have continued his narrative when its climax had already been achieved.

Mark twain's range in point of view is readily apparent in those works in which he uses fictional narrators. To reassure oneself on this point it is necessary only to recall some of his more famous narrators: Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Huckleberry Finn, Hank Morgan, Sieur Louis de Conte, King Leopold, and Captain Ben Stormfield, not to mention Adam, Eve, a horse, and a dog. What is not so readily apparent, however, is that an analogous range in point of view exists in those works narrated not by personae but by “Mark Twain”—such works as the travel letters and books, “Old Times on the Mississippi,” “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” and the bulk of the short newspaper and magazine sketches. In some of these Twain played it straight; that is, he employed in them a point of view that was essentially his own. In others he assumed a pose, a point of view other than his own. And in still others, especially in the longer works, he alternated between real and assumed points of view. My concern in this essay is with the nature and range of these assumed points of view.

Arthur Gordon Pym has been dead these many years, having perished, we are told, in an accident shortly after his return from a journey to the south. The faint tappings we have heard of late do not come from within the box, but from without; modern critics are attempting to loosen the nails pounded in by decades of indifference. In view of America's history of literary revivals and resurrections, it would not be surprising to see the lid fly suddenly off, letting Pym, like Mr. Shuttleworthy, spring into a sitting position and proclaim himself the author of a great masterpiece of literature.

Nothing that dramatic is likely to happen. But it is true that after one hundred years of bewilderment at the betrayal of sensibility evidenced in the French admiration of The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, American critics and literary historians began to praise or condemn the book on a firmer basis than the memory of a childhood reading. In the last few years three critics have given the work the benefit of sensitive and mature judgment. To these I feel the need to add some thoughts, partly because someone, in memory of Poe, should cherish the vision of the young artist, happy in his artist's duplicity, juggling parts, manipulating symbols with ingenuity and dexterity toward an end he was destined never to achieve; and partly, too, because I can now say, with all the assurance of hindsight, that as an artist he was doomed almost from the start, that the philosophical ending was in the artistic beginning. Poe's works are all variations on a single persistent theme that finds its expression in forms ranging from pure hokum to pure speculation. Somewhere between the extremes, in a few stories, Poe manages to strike a chord familiar to the modern reader's ear.

Anatole France was so exclusively French that one hardly expects to find a foreigner in his intimate circle. His address books list very few aliens. Carlos Blacker is the only one of these who is listed four times. We have some forty letters from France to Blacker and an equal number from Blacker to France between 1915 and 1921. There were undoubtedly more. Their acquaintance dated back a number of years before these letters begin. The correspondence shows that France was capable of unexpected warmth at a time of life when friendships are not easily formed. France was seventy and Blacker fifty-five when associations of the war period deepened their relationship. By 1917 France was ending his letters with such expressions as: “A vous tendrement,” “Je vous embrasse tendrement.”

Herbert read's prose fantasy, The Green Child, is one of those strange works defiant of classification. Though judged favorably by the few critics and scholars who give it serious study, it is so vaguely and variously interpreted that it would seem to lack both the form and the content which justify such praise. The problem of interpretation and analysis is complicated by the structure of the work. Its division into three arbitrarily related sections allows critics to pick their favorite section, claim for it central importance and base their analyses on that part. An understanding and appreciation of the work is further complicated because Read has been for thirty-five years a leading spokesman for romanticism, anarchism, and humanism—doctrines which seem to counter those expressed in The Green Child. The style of the book, for example, is commonly regarded as classical. The political philosophy reflects a conservative anti-utopian attitude, and humanist ideals are set aside by natural processes ultimately destructive of man's conscious efforts. An understanding of Read's philosophy in the historical situation in which it arose, a knowledge of his theory of fantasy, comprehension of his irony, and an awareness of the structure of the work help to explain the curious nature of The Green Child.

Although the wealth of religious imagery in Hawthorne's “Roger Marvin's Burial” has been frequently remarked, little attempt has been made to identify specific Biblical allusions for the purpose of analyzing them in the light of the story in which they appear. This neglect of an important aspect of the author's complex method of composition extends to the whole of his work and is the result of a generally held, though ill-defined, idea that such allusions, stemming as they do from the author's known familiarity with the Bible, represent pure overflow and are not truly integral to the pieces in which they are embedded. Nathalia Wright, for example, has observed that compared to Melville, Hawthorne made “slight and straightforward use of Scripture.” I submit that a more rigorous examination of Hawthorne's use of the Bible than has heretofore been made will reveal the reverse to be true. His employment of Scripture is extensive, subtle, and must be considered an organic aspect of a most complex literary method. An analysis of the uses to which Hawthorne put his Biblical sources in “Roger Malvin's Burial” will serve to illustrate the case in point.

The american “international novel” derives its importance as a genre from a few outstanding practitioners—from the early Howells, above all from James and Edith Wharton. To say this is of course to suggest a definition which fits novels like A Foregone Conclusion, or The Ambassadors, or Madame de Treymes, the kind of definition Professor Cargill proposed recently in an article claiming the title of “The First International Novel” for James's The American. In such novels the conflict between different sets of manners and mores, “the mixture of manners,” as James called it in the preface to “Lady Barbarina,” is essential. Usually it leads to illumination, an illumination sometimes but not always shared by the hero. That depends on his intelligence and character.

Human experience, according to Santayana, may be described as a conflict between the spirit and the imperfections which distract it from the pure and ideal toward which it aspires. And yet, to complete the paradox, there is no spirit without these imperfections, the matrix of flesh and world, space and time, which contains it. This is as much as anything a poet's dramatic vision: it is Yeats's with his passion to preserve the senses in an eternity of time, and it is Wallace Stevens' with his more realistic search for a balance between the antinomies of self and world. For Stevens, the imagination is the single power that can effect the vital unity, in life or in poetry: it alone can provide the aesthetic economy of experience so urgent for the modern romantic sensibility. Stevens is a romantic, or better, a neo-romantic poet who has gone to school to the French Symbolists and post-Symbolists only to conclude that the ends available to the artist are not metaphysical but aesthetic, and thus human. The romantic poet necessarily lives in two worlds: that of his sensual experience and that of his imaginative vision. In those moments when he manages to blend the two, he achieves not only a poem but that singular experience of “truth” from which he draws his spiritual sanctions. And if God is absent from his universe, as he is from Stevens', the moments of reconciliation become increasingly problematical but no less pressing.

In most criticism of Faulkner it has been taken for granted that his Yoknapatawpha County is really Lafayette (accented on fay) County, Mississippi, and that his Jefferson, the county seat, is really Oxford. Little evidence on the matter has been given beyond a few very general resemblances, and little has been demanded. Recently, however, the assumption has been questioned, with a considerable marshaling of arguments and statistics. It seems proper, therefore, to go into the question in some detail, particularly since a good deal of the evidence is already beyond the reach of the literary researcher and much of the rest will probably disappear within the next few years. Local changes have already been sufficient to lead to some literary misinterpretations.

During an interview with Jacques Brenner, published in Arts (March 1953), Robbe-Grillet asserted that Les Gommes is a descriptive and scientific novel. In January 1959, in an interview with Denise Bourdet, Robbe-Grillet stated that “l'observation scientifique consiste à décrire sans interpréter, à ne jamais donner une signification aux choses.” His novels are noteworthy indeed for their absence of analysis, and readers familiar with his descriptive method will have no difficulty concluding that if Les Gommes is a “scientific novel,” so also are Le Voyeur, La Jalousie, and Dans le labyrinthe. But in what way are these novels “scientific”? Is Robbe-Grillet initiating a “new realism” as has been suggested, or is it more accurately a new naturalism? If we may be permitted to define naturalism as a realism with scientific pretensions, and if we apply the rigorous pattern of Freudian determinism—provided we accept Freud's method as “scientific”—to the psychic and mental operations of Mathias in Le Voyeur, and of the jealous husband in La Jalousie, then these novels would seem to qualify as naturalistic.

La chute is a disturbing and ironic picture of modern man caught in a hell of his own making. Since the involved irony and ambiguity make it Camus's most difficult work, the book was initially misunderstood by a number of critics. To appreciate fully the meaning of the novel it is necessary to understand Camus's use of literary parallels and of allusions to his own experience and to the history of his time. Some of the basic literary and historical allusions have been noted in recent criticism. The following study will examine in detail these allusions and will attempt to clarify the meaning of La Chute by elucidating particularly the relationship between the echoes of Dante and the echoes of L'Homme révolté and the controversy following its publication.