Tennyson's In Memoriam furnishes a case study, a vexed and difficult one, in the persistence of literary tradition. Though it is not, strictly speaking, a pastoral elegy, In Memoriam yet retains unmistakable markings of the traditional form. A. J. Carr, for one, has recently insisted upon the importance of pastoral motifs “to provide the personal themes of In Memoriam with a formal structure responsive to both private instinct and the elegiac traditions.” On the other hand, others as early as A. C. Bradley and as recently as Elton Edward Smith have offered what amounts to the opposite judgment on the significance of the pastoral tradition as a key to the structure of In Memoriam. In Smith's words, “the classical elegiac conventions are observed, but not in such a way as to provide either a framework for the whole or dividing lines within the work.”

Leo Spitzer's well-known article on Villon's “Ballade des dames du temps jadis,” published in 1940, had an evident double purpose. His sensitive and sensible explication of the ballade was at the same time the occasion for a statement of the need to revitalize medieval studies. Spitzer put it bluntly: “L'interprétation de la littérature médiévale me semble souffrir, dans tous les pays, d'une grande tare: de la carence du sens esthétique.” The treatment of Villon's ballade was then explicitly meant as a model of the new critical approach, and obviously the choice of poet was made with the polemic purpose clearly in mind. Villon is an ideal subject for resolutely “esthetic” explication, and his works on every level demonstrate a poetic craftsmanship which detailed reading can bring out to best advantage.

Artist first, then Poet,' some writer said of me. I should answer, 'Poeta nascitur non fit'; indeed, ‘Poeta nascitur et fit.‘ I suppose I was nearer thirty than twenty before I was anything of an artist.“ Tennyson, here reconstructing his early literary biography for his son's Memoir, mentions the metrical experiments à la Thomson, Pope, Scott, and Shakespeare with which he amused himself between the ages of eight and fourteen, commenting apparently on what one must do before beginning to become ”anything of an artist.“

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Howells wrote three books on England: London Films (1906), Certain Delightful English Towns (1906), and Seven English Cities (1909). As with most of his book publication, nearly all of these three had appeared in magazines, with about forty pages of London Films first coming out in the December 1904 issues of Harper's Monthly and the North American Review and with one essay of Seven English Cities printed in Harper's as late as July 1909. The first two books resulted from Howells' visit to England from March to October 1904, and the last partly from a visit in May and June 1908, though it drew also upon his earlier, longer stay. From the beginning he showed an outward reluctance to return to travel literature, his first extended work in the genre since Tuscan Cities in 1886 and A Little Swiss Sojourn in 1892. In a letter of 12 April 1904 to his wife he complained that Colonel George Harvey, of Harper & Brothers, “in spite of our agreement … has told round that I'm going to do a book,” and he went on to ask her to remember “that I have not yet promised any sort of book on England, though probably I shall do one of some sort.” But in the same letter he reported doing “a tentative impression which could be used in the Spectator and Harper's Weekly” (neither did print it); he had already written letters and sent a “diary” to his wife, from which his daughter, who accompanied him to England, has observed he drew upon for his first two books; and he had begun the first of four notebooks soon after his landing at Plymouth in March. At least as early as February 15, as Robert W. Walts has found, Howells had written to F. A. Duneka of Harper's about a proposed travel book; and as Walts remarks, after quoting more extensively than I have from the April 12 letter to Howells' wife: “Nevertheless, after the indignation had been smothered, two books, London Films and Certain Delightful English Towns, were produced from that trip.”

Hawthorne was interested in polarities, and his writings show a keen concern for chiaroscuro effects through description and characterization. Both his fiction and the notebooks reveal his liking for sharp contrasts—light and shade in scene and mood. Hawthorne's use of slants of light and of mirror effects to highlight contrasts is well-known. “Lights and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know neither whence they come nor whither they go; nor do I inquire too closely into them.”

In 1949, A. Norman Jeffares declared that, although Yeats's poetry “had reblossomed in The Wild Swans at Coole [1919] and Michael Robartes and the Dancer [1921], the flowering came with The Tower” [1928]. In 1954, Richard Ellmann called The Tower and The Winding Stair “the two finest volumes” of the period 1917–33. Today, this estimate is the generally accepted one: B. Rajan has recently written, “With The Tower and The Winding Stair, Yeats's writing comes fully into its strength and words respond completely to the poem's call to order. To say that Yeats was incapable of writing a bad poem during this phase is an exaggeration, but one within the limits of critical licence.”

Can Dominique's life be construed as a success or a failure? The hero not only gives up Madeleine, the woman he loves, but passion in its most idealistic form, by marrying a woman whose name is not even mentioned. Although an encounter between Dominique and his family suggests an idyllic painting, although his marriage brings the rewards of peace and serenity, it can be considered a compromise. Together with his impossible love, Dominique gives up his literary ambition. He thus accepts once and for all the mediocrity of his talents. Denial of both creativity and ambition may strike one as tantamount to resignation and defeat. To this self-imposed restriction in regard to emotion and creative action corresponds significantly a refusal to explore the outer world. Dominique will not leave the community of which, in accordance with family tradition, he has become mayor. He has traced a circle around his existence, as though to ward off danger and risk. Using Dominique's own words, one could claim that he leads a life of refusal, dedicated primarily to the gratuitous obliteration of his faults.

The “Estoria de dos amadores” interpolated into the autobiographic El siervo libre de amor by Juan Rodríguez del Padrón tells two love stories which embody conflicting ideals of love. This thematic duality is reflected in the descriptions that surround each relationship, and two meaningful patterns emerge, one relating love to nature, the other relating love to the life of the court. The first appears in the story of Ardanlier and Liessa, in which a life of pleasure and sexual fulfillment is associated with their retreat to the forest; while the second emerges from the story of Ardanlier and the Infanta Yrena, a tale of suffering and sexual frustration acted out in the ambience of the court. The thematic key is provided by the epithets applied to the two women, the “plazentera Liessa” and the “padeçiente Yrena.” The tension between these two poles of feeling is resolved on a narrative level by the tragic death of Liessa, the resulting suicide of Ardanlier, and the self-immolation of Yrena. This resolution is reflected thematically by the fusion of the two worlds of love, the courtly and the natural, into the single, semi-divine image of the lovers' tomb. The elevation of the tomb to a shrine by means of enchantment perpetuates the fame of the protagonists' exemplary lives and combines their conflicting emotional experiences.

“ … I cannot throw away The Orators as worthless bosh,” wrote Alan Pryce-Jones. “It appears to be the work of a sane imagination without a mind—a far more complicated state than the paranoiac's working on fragments of knowledge and experience.” Such exasperation typifies the reaction of the vast majority of critics to the appearance of Auden's second book. Even the sympathetic G. W. Stonier had to confess that “With so much in this book that is fine and original, one hesitates to ask the author for more explanation. Yet that is what is needed. He works so intimately, but at such a distance. One hopes that time will bridge the gap, and that we will get nearer to him or he to us.” Unfortunately, however, since 1932 the gap between The Orators and the critic has more often widened than narrowed, critics preferring to speak vaguely about the work's significance rather than to grapple with its complex details. Richard Hoggart in 1951 and J. W. Beach in 1957 shed light on some of these details, but not until the last few years, in the writings of Justin Replogle and Monroe K. Spears, have serious attempts been made to deal with The Orators as a meaningful whole. Yet, of his own interpretation, Spears has to confess: “We can be sure that enough dark corners will remain, even if we succeed in casting light on a considerable part of its territory.”By probing some of these remaining “dark corners,” I hope to cast yet further light on Auden's most puzzling work.

It is all too tempting on first acquaintance with Gide's La Porte étroite to see in it only the pathetically tragic tale of a young girl who believed too wholeheartedly that “virtue is its own reward.” Not too surprising, for this seems to be the reaction Gide intended to elicit. He protested against the view of some critics that he had “evolved” to a more sympathetic moral and religious attitude since 1902 and the publication of L'Immoraliste. He insisted repeatedly that he sought rather to make the work a criticism of a certain furiously deplorable protestantism, a puritanism that curiously evokes Jansenism, a misplaced sense of heroism which he characterizes as a sort of “cornélianisme gratuit.” This last must certainly apply to Alissa rather than to Jérôme.

A unque la temática religiosa constituya una de las facetas más ricas de toda la creación galdosiana, no cabe duda que ésta alcanza su apogeo en el autor, como cantera de materia novelable, entre 1876 y 1878. En cuatro Novelas de primera época, publicadas entre los años citados, concentró Galdós toda su extraordinaria capacidad de concreción literaria sobre esa problemática de actualidad insoslayable: Boña Perfecta (abril, 1876), Gloria (diciembre, 1876; mayo, 1877), Marianela (enero, 1878) y La familia de León Roch (junio, octubre y diciembre, 1878).

Thoreau's Walden has often been studied as a symbolic work exemplifying the romantic quest for rebirth. No one, however, has demonstrated that, like many other masterpieces of the period, its title identifies its chief symbol.My purpose is to demonstrate this point and show its significance for the work as a whole.

The intricate architectural structure of Valle-Inclán's Ruedo ibérico is one of the trilogy's most original features. Not only does the work portray what is going on throughout that ruedo during the last months of Isabel II's reign, but the individual novels and their constituent parts have been constructed in the form of circles as well. Books i and ix, ii and viii, iii and vii, and iv and vi in both La corte de los milagros and Viva mi dueño bear many and close relationships with each other, leaving Book v in each case as the axis upon which the others revolve. Therefore, every book of Corte and Viva, with the exception of the two central books, has a sister book within the given novel with which it shares setting, characters, and subject matter. However, this broad general circularity is the merest beginning of the total revolution of the Ruedo. In addition to the relationships between certain books within a novel, each book is itself constructed in the form of a circle, as are some of its chapters. Finally, given books in one novel are parallel to their counterparts in the other. Valle-Inclán's use of the circle as an organizational device was not an arbitrary choice. On the contrary, the Ruedo ibérico is a synthesis of form and content whose origin will be found to lie in certain concepts expressed in such earlier works as La lámpara maravillosa and La media noche.