Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno, like many other poems of its period, celebrates God's goodness to men and the plenitude of His creation. But one need only compare it with other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works similar in theme—the quasi-scientific treatises of John Ray, William Derham, and Thomas Burnet, or James Thomson's The Seasons—to see how urgent and personally felt Smart's hymn of praise is. It was Smart's belief that God creates and sustains a cosmic harmony upon which the universe is contingent—in effect, God sings the universe into being—and the poet's duty is to serve as a kind of choir-master leading the creation in an answering song. Because harmony between God and His creation is necessary for the physical continuation of the universe, Smart's concern with the multitude of animals, birds, fish, plants, stones, and even planets in the Jubilate is much more than a rambling appreciation of them. He invokes them as models for men. For, in fulfilling their proper natures, the Lobster, the Hornet, and the Wild Beet contribute naturally to the universal harmony what man must contribute voluntarily, namely praise to the Creator of all.

Afrail-Looking, self-absorbed man of letters, A. E. Housman had no attributes visibly suitable for the profession of arms. Nevertheless, soldiering and the accidents of military life fascinated him; and a large number of his poems, including some of his best ones, are on military and warlike themes. This trait of Housman's has not been systematically studied, and casual explanations of it have been contradictory. For example, Norman Marlow asserts that soldiers attracted Housman “by their colourful uniforms and their destiny,” and again because they are “men paid to die,” and in another place, and a higher register, because of their “relentless pursuit of glory” (A. E. Housman: Scholar and Poet, London, 1958, pp. 114, 158). Housman's biographer George L. Watson traces four other causes. Housman found in soldiering “not the glory of the battlefield, but the discipline of the drillmaster”; he loved soldiers for being “not so much heroes as automatons.” Then the fact that a soldier might be “often susceptible to his own sex” appealed to Housman's invert imaginings. Also, says Watson, Housman yearned toward “the gallant bearing and ripe masculinity of men in uniform.” In sharp contrast, he felt through his own disasters “a sense of closer kinship with their unhappy lot” (A. E. Housman: A Divided Life, London, 1958, pp. 59–60, 145).

For the past fifteen years scholars have examined many facets of Mark Twain's “Jumping Frog”: its narrative techniques and some of its textual history, its relation to folklore, American humor, and Clemens' theory of humorous gravity, and its political, regional, and cultural bearings. This article, by focussing on the personal background to the tale, tries to cast light on the imagination that created the famous yarn. It first relates some of the tale's narrative elements—episodes, characters, names—to Clemens' prior experience, especially to some activities reflected in newly discovered examples of his San Francisco journalism of 1864 and 1865. Then it relates the tale to strong emotional currents in his life during the fall of 1865. Finally the article proposes a date of composition for the “Jumping Frog” and a reading of the tale that emphasizes the level of personal meaning.

It has taken a relatively short time for critics to become convinced of the basic continuity of James Joyce's entire body of work, despite Joyce's own protestations while in the process of creation that he had forgotten each previous effort in favor of the one in progress. While concerned with Leopold Bloom, Joyce impatiently asserted that “Stephen no longer interests me. He has a shape that can't be changed,” and when writing Finnegans Wake, he contemptuously shrugged off Ulysses: “Ulysses! Who wrote it? I've forgotten it.” It was imperative for him as an artist to concentrate on his new effort, and since he acted as his own publicity agent, it was necessary for him to call attention to it; but a retrospective appraisal should take note of the manner in which each work overlaps with one another: the child in the first three stories of Dubliners is very much the child Stephen in the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist, Richard Rowan in Exiles is a projected image of the mature Stephen, and Shem the Penman is a caricature of both. Finnegans Wake in fact is a summation of all that Joyce had previously written: it recapitulates themes and motifs, reworks many of the same characters, and puns every previous Joyce title into its fabric. The Dreamer in the Wake is more than just a single individual, even if one assumes that on the literal level we are viewing the dream of publican H. C. Earwicker.

The Little Boy lost
Father, father, where are you going
O do not walk so fast.
Speak father, speak to your little boy
Or else I shall be lost,
The night was dark no father was there
The child was wet with dew.
The mire was deep, & the child did weep
And away the vapour flew.

The Little Boy found
The little boy lost in the lonely fen,
Led by the wand'ring light,
Began to cry, but God ever nigh,
Appeard like his father in white.
He kissed the child & by the hand led
And to his mother brought,
Who in sorrow pale, thro' the lonely dale
Her little boy weeping sought.

In William Blake's Songs of Innocence appear two tiny, apparently simple poems that have, until recently, attracted relatively little critical attention. Some critics have ignored “The Little Boy lost,” and “The Little Boy found” entirely; others have treated them as relatively insignificant examples of innocence preserved.Several critics are clearly puzzled by the poems: Joseph Wicksteed, for example, finds the disappearance of the vapour in “The Little Boy lost” both mysterious and ultimately inexplicable (pp. 46–47), whereas E. D. Hirsch, Jr., has more recently admitted that the “best symbolic interpretation” of these two poems is “not characteristic of the Songs of Innocence.” Only one critic, Robert Gleckner, has argued for their importance in the Songs of Innocence, but Gleckner has perhaps gone too far in attempting to elevate them to the status of key poems in the Songs of Innocence.

There is a sentence in the preface to the Harrison Hayford-Merton Sealts version of Billy Budd that has been quoted before and will be quoted again. It is the one in which the editors hope that their “comprehensive scholarly edition will narrow the ground of disagreement and widen that of understanding.” It is doomed to repetition because it allows any critic who cites it a ready-made rhetorical stance: with its sanction he can assume the posture of the reasonable reader and humbly offer himself as mediator between the various opposing critical armies. Then, having established himself as a man of good will and peacemaker, he can do his best to annihilate at least one of the armies, the views of which, it somehow turns out, he rabidly despises.

Of all the ambiguous publications which for two centuries have muddied the waters of Sterne scholarship, none has given more trouble than a small volume which appeared in 1788 with the title Original Letters of the Late Reverend Mr. Laurence Sterne; Never Before Published. Printed at the Logographic Press and issued without a word of explanation twenty years after Sterne's death, this collection of thirty-nine letters contains material which, if it can be accepted as authentic, is of substantial importance to the biographer of Sterne. Unfortunately, the biographers have never been able to agree on its authenticity.

Students of wordsworth's criticism have long recognized that he conceived of poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. But commentators on Wordsworth often remind us that he was no aesthetic libertine. If he thought of poetry as a river of emotion, he did not wish it to become a flood; in the well-known passage from the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads of 1800, he voices the hope that “habits of meditation” have disciplined his feelings, and he declares that good poets are made such only by deep, sustained, habitual contemplation. These are commonplaces of Wordsworthian scholarship. Curiously enough, however, the full meaning of these commonplaces remains unexplored. The conjunction of thought and feeling in Wordsworth's poetic is all too readily accepted; for the most part, critics have failed to define the terms or the precise relationship between them. Yet the materials for such a definition are very much at hand. Wordsworth himself received them from John Dennis, who helped him to see that the effect of thought upon feeling is qualitative. It produces a feeling different in kind from ordinary emotion—a feeling Wordsworth came to regard as indispensable to the exercise of imaginative power.

When Keats in a letter calls this world “The vale of Soul-making,” he comes close to Wordsworth's way of thinking. For Keats says that we come into the world as pure potentiality or “Intelligence” and that we acquire a “Soul” or “sense of Identity” through “Circumstances.” And it is the main purport of Wordsworth's poetry to show the spiritual significance of this world, to show that we evolve a soul or identity through experience and that the very process of evolution is what we mean by soul.

“Uriel” is a poetic summary of many strains of thought in Emerson's early philosophy. Most interpretations of the poem have, however, emphasized its biographical significance. Stephen E. Whicher, for instance, has used the poem to illustrate the shock felt by the sanguine transcendentalist at the unfavorable reception of his Divinity School Address. But “Uriel” is important not simply because the “stern old war-gods” who “shook their heads” may be Andrews Norton and the Harvard Divinity School faculty, or because the “seraphs” who “frowned from their myrtle-beds” were the budding young powers of New England theology, assembled in 1838 at their “holy festival.” To be sure, one of the poem's highlights is its trenchant and witty satire of what Emerson called, in his Address, “historical Christianity.” That false faith, however, was but one manifestation of a pernicious mode of perception and discourse which the author found throughout history and contemporary thought. The poem was inspired not by a local animus but by a comprehensive, “meter-making” philosophical argument. It was probably composed early in 1845, well after the immediate animosities of the controversy over the Address had fallen into perspective. From that distance, Emerson generalized the biographical incident into a clash of opposing philosophies.

In his artistic development, William Carlos Williams offers us a series of enactments of the process of slow, laborious birth which he so often made the subject of his verse. When we look at Williams' career, we find long periods of groping experiment which culminate in brief phases of accomplished expression; the volumes Spring and All (1923), The Wedge (1944), and Journey to Love (1955) mark these major phases in his development. But the time of most profound change and growth for Williams was between 1902 and 1914. During that period of his early manhood Williams slowly evolved the identity that would provide the confident impetus for his later stylistic experiments. In evolving his idea of himself, Williams was most importantly influenced by Walt Whitman; the Camden Bard helped the Rutherford doctor both to discover and to affirm his mature identity.