The recent turn towards historicist criticism in Spenser studies, exemplified by the fashion for placing the poet in an Irish context, has inhibited studies of a more formal kind. Critics like S. K. Heninger and Jean Brink have tried to rein in readers bent on contextualising Spenser to death. The last major work on Spenser's language was Herbert Sugden's The Grammar of Spenser's Faerie Queene, first published in 1936 and reissued thirty years later. Sugden's findings - that Spenser's style was cramped by his approach to poetic diction, his desire to enhance poetic language, the limitations of theme and the constraints of his chosen verse form - have found general acceptance. In her contribution to The Spenser Encyclopedia Barbara Strang pointed out the paradox that despite universal acknowledgement of Spenser's facility for language, this aspect of his work 'has received practically no attention during the last thirty years, when items for the Spenser bibliography have been pouring off the presses at an average rate of three a week'. It is a measure of the richness and complexity of the subject that Strang's comprehensive entry on this topic is supplemented by separate essays on dialect, etymology, glossing, morphology and syntax, names, neologisms, pronunciation, puns, rhyme and versification. The problem is that all of these features overlap.

As the editorial manifesto he wrote in 1850 to accompany the first number of Household Words indicates, Dickens had always aspired “to live in the Household affections, and to be numbered among the Household thoughts” of his readers. He saw himself as a prophet of the hearth, and his contemporaries hailed his reputation as the purveyor of cozy domestic bliss. As a reviewer of David Copperfield in Fraser’s Magazine wrote, “There is not a fireside in the kingdom where the cunning fellow has not contrived to secure a corner for himself as one of the dearest, and, by this time, one of the oldest friends of the family.” This reviewer attributes Dickens’s widespread popularity to “his deep reverence for the household sanctities, his enthusiastic worship of the household gods.” Yet despite this reputation as the prophet of domestic bliss, any close examination of Dickens’s novels reveals very few portraits of happy and harmonious families. According to George Newlin, a statistical analysis of the novels yields 149 full orphans, 82 with no father, and 87 with no mother, making a total of 318 full or partial orphans: “only fifteen named characters we deem significant in the major works (novels and Christmas Books) had or have two parents, and in nearly half of these cases their families today would be considered dysfunctional.”

When Elizabeth Tudor was seven months old, she was displayed naked to the French ambassador and two other special envoys, so they might see and report that the marriage of the King of England and his new queen had been sanctioned by the birth of a child who was free from physical deformity. During the early decades of her reign, the Spanish ambassadors bribed Elizabeth's laundresses so that they might know if she had regular menstrual cycles. When the second round of French marriage negotiations began in 1579 (the queen was then 45 years old), Lord Burghley consulted her female servants and physicians in an effort to determine whether she was still capable of bearing children (he decided that she was). Attention to the monarch's body, to even its most intimate functions, was nothing new in early modern Europe. When that body was female, however, the scrutiny was different in kind.

The powers ascribed to male and female were asymmetrical in sixteenthcentury law, in sixteenth-century physiology, in sixteenth-century social life; when a female prince inherited the throne of England, she constituted both a practical and a representational crisis. The state was considered to hold a large proprietary interest in sexuality and procreation. Female chastity was the bearer of formidable ideological and practical significance; it was the indispensable guarantor of social coherence, legitimate title and the orderly maintenance and transfer of material wealth, including land tenure.

'Who knowes not Colin Clout?' asks The Faerie Queene (1596), nodding to the renown of its own author and his poetic alter ego. As posed here, near the conclusion of what was to be the final book of Spenser's epic and the greatest poetic achievement of the sixteenth century, this is surely meant as a rhetorical question. But rhetorical in what way exactly? Does the remark bespeak the bravado of ambition realised, of a career successfully accomplished? Or is it a presage of fame, pointing towards a horizon of celebrity and its rewards: that is, an aspiration not quite yet, but perhaps now at last about to be attained? Or does the rhetorical cast of the query - embedded in the poem's narrative as a parenthetical aside: 'Poor Colin Clout (who knowes not Colin Clout?)' (VI, X, 16)1 - mask a more fraught gesture of selfpromotion, one borne of the concern that there may indeed still be those who know not Colin Clout, or, in any event, have yet to prize 'Poor Colin' according to his real worth? What does it mean, we should further inquire, that Spenser does not proffer this question from a secure position within or even near Elizabeth's court, the putative epicentre of the courtly values and virtues his nationalistic epic celebrates, and, as a cynosure of elite cultural activity, the seemingly natural home for a poet who presents himself as the nation's laureate? Instead, Spenser's query issues from the outposts of the kingdom, from the 'wilds' of Ireland, where he spent most of the last twenty years of his life pursuing, in tandem with his poetic career, another career as a colonial official and a planter.

If cinema, born 1895, was the child of Victorian visual technology and the entrancement of the eye, then the Victorian novel stood it god-parent. Its direct ancestors were the photograph, the panorama, and the magic lantern; the circus and the melodramatic theatre; the railway, which turned the world into “moving pictures” and opened up touristic pleasures; the ghoulish waxwork and the tableau vivant; and the overwhelming, kinetic city. But it was from fiction that film inherited its mass audience, its social function, its plots, and its techniques of narration. And from no other author did film inherit so much as from the Victorian writer who most imaginatively absorbed the influences of those other ancestors: Charles Dickens.

Since 1897, when the Mutoscope Company put the Death of Nancy Sykes [sic] on the screen, more films have been made of works by Dickens than of any other author’s: there are 130 Dickens films on record and only Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde beat out Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol (of which there are 30-plus versions each) for the status of most-filmed single fiction in history. Part of Dickens’s lure is the childhood appeal of his fiction, along with the “Inimitable’s” proto-modern celebrity status, and the sheer familiarity of the texts, reinforced by frequent theatrical adaptation; part derives from the “mythic” characters who – like the film stars of Hollywood’s golden age – seem larger than the stories that contain them. The attraction is partly economic: all of Dickens’s fictions were out of copyright by 1920. It speaks both of national identity and of international appeal and interpretive openness.

When Proust announced to Marie Nordlinger in December of 1899 that he had begun working on something different from what he usually did, dealing with Ruskin and certain cathedrals, he could scarcely have imagined upon what a long road he was embarking, or where it would lead him. Perhaps without realising it, he had closed the early period of his literary apprenticeship and begun a new era in which he would exercise his talents as a critic and translator, rather than as a creative writer. Before this second period was completed, Proust would publish two translations of Ruskin's works, and various articles and reviews about him. Though it might seem that this labour of erudition was a detour from his main path as a writer, and though he often chafed under the constraints it imposed on his creative imagination, it was in fact his Ruskin work that paradoxically led him to the discovery of a form for the narrative he was later to write, A la recherche du temps perdu.

Proust had made his literary début in 1893 with the publication of Les Plaisirs et les jours, a collection of texts that were largely traditional in form, cast in the classical and symbolist moulds he had inherited from his immediate literary predecessors. When he later embarked upon writing a novel, he again tried to shape it within the framework of conventional nineteenth-century forms, the autobiographical novel and the Bildungsroman, or novel of growth and self-discovery. It seems likely that the reason he never finished this narrative (published posthumously under the title Jean Santeuil) was his dissatisfaction with its structure.

“Metaphor is the whole of poetry.” “Poetry is simply made of metaphor . . . Every poem is a new metaphor inside or it is nothing.” (CPPP, 786) Such are the burdens Robert Frost placed upon metaphor, and on himself as a poet. He went even farther in his claiming that metaphor is the whole of thinking, and that, therefore, to be educated by poetry - note: by poetry - is to be taught to think (CPPP, 786). In “Education by Poetry,” an essay that originated in a talk at Amherst, he says:

Few authors foreground the arts quite so comprehensively as Proust; certainly, none made them so central to their own literary production. Proust's whole life was saturated with love of the arts, and so too was to be his great novel: probably no other work of literature celebrates the arts as totally as his, or is so convincing in this pursuit. If one could point to, say, Joyce or Thomas Mann as examples of writers who display a keen awareness of the literary possibilities of incorporating the arts into the fabric of their own work, even their efforts seem small when compared to Proust's.

We are fortunate in possessing a clear picture of Proust’s artistic tastes in his youth, and as he grew up. Two general questionnaires which he filled in have survived (CSB, pp.335–7), and the entries for the arts make fascinating reading: if, at the age of about fourteen, there is a predictable juvenility about some of his choices (George Sand, the historian Augustin Thierry, Musset, Meissonnier, Mozart, Gounod), there are already signs of the maturity which was to be expressed, fully-fledged, in the questionnaire completed at the age of 21. Here, the list acquires more substance: Anatole France, Pierre Loti, Baudelaire, Vigny, Beethoven, Wagner, Schumann, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt. And, as if to underscore the import of his choices, at the top of the questionnaire Proust has written ‘Marcel Proust par lui-même’ [‘Marcel Proust on himself’].

In a 1975 essay, where I proposed Frost's “The Wind and the Rain” as his best “unknown” poem, I also claimed that the opening ten poems in A Witness Tree (1942) (“The Wind and the Rain” is one of them), is the most impressive sequence of poems to be found anywhere in the poet's work. The sequence, I wrote, contained “extremes of delicate tenderness and of shocking brutality,” and its pervasive melancholy reached a depth not hitherto encountered, or to be encountered again, in Frost. Recently two accounts of the biographical circumstances out of which A Witness Tree emerged have caused me and perhaps others to think again about that book, especially its opening sequence, and about the degree to which a poet's art can be more fully understood and appreciated when we learn more about the life experiences that surround and motivate it. My comments here are directed toward clarifying, or at least exploring further, these matters of literary and biographical criticism.

The Narrator's reflections on love, sexuality and friendship are at first sight baldly phrased, universalising and tragic.

In Paris, on Saturday, 3 September 1870, as news of the humiliating defeat of the French by the invading Prussian army at Sedan spread throughout the capital, Dr Adrien Proust, a middle-aged Catholic bachelor, a grocer's son originally from the small provincial town of Illiers, married Jeanne Weil, the Jewish daughter of a wealthy Parisian family. At twenty-one, the beautiful, dark-haired woman was fifteen years younger than the bridegroom. No one knows how they met, but it is likely they were introduced at a government sponsored event or social gathering. Adrien had recently risen to the top ranks in public health administration and Jeanne's family had many connections in official circles.

Marcel was born the following July at Uncle Louis Weil’s estate at Auteuil where Jeanne’s family usually spent the summer months. The house, built of quarrystones, was large, with spacious rooms, including a drawing room with a grand piano and a billiard room where the family sometimes slept to keep cool during heat waves. In fine weather Louis and his guests enjoyed the large garden with a pond surrounded by hawthorn trees, whose blossoms Marcel was also to admire in his other uncle, Jules Amiot’s garden in Illiers.

As we turn the page from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, the literary reputation of Marcel Proust is clearly on the rise. Not only does he continue to be considered a primary figure in European Modernism occupying the same rarefied aesthetic atmosphere as James Joyce, Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, but increasingly, within the field of French Studies, he is being singled out as the twentieth-century writer, or even, the French writer of all time. Thus Jean-Yves Tadié, the author of the most comprehensive biographical study on Proust to date and also the general editor of the 1987–9 Pléiade edition of A la recherche du temps perdu, does not hesitate to assert:

We live in an age of epistemes as decals: depthless, portable, easy to peel and carry off. Or so we think. Robert Frost did not. But his epistemes were not firmly anchored either. Here is an example. Frost rejects the gentility and aesthetic dandyism of his immediate predecessors (William Vaughn Moody, say, or Oscar Wilde). They, politely or with disdain, luxuriated in art's imposed or elected exemption from the commerce-based estimates of the Gilded Age. They rejected their culture's exaltation of values associated with industrial manufacture and market capitalism, technology and business - the values of utility and commodity - as ultimate standards of worth. Frost shared their doubt that commercial viability and usefulness alone could properly evaluate all things, but he differed from both genteel and art-for-art's-sake assumptions in taking it for granted that his culture's dominant values were real ones, with their own legitimate, if partial, claims on literature and life. Thus Frost's “realism” of subject matter and treatment, his culturally derived or driven recasting of supposedly feminine poetry as a form of manly prowess and competition, and his “commercial” insistence on “the trial by market everything [including poems] must come to” (CPPP, 845) seem to exist at a chill, even polar remove from Wilde's heated, anti-utilitarian faith that life imitates art. But the complications twist, then turn. Frost's passionate preference for Jamesian “wishful” thinking, his insistence that knowledge is metaphorical, his subtle but persistent intertextuality, his unmooring of meaning from fixity, and his pleasure in parodic appropriation all have a Wilde, postmodern savor.

Received opinion dictates that Proust is a 'difficult' author. Is this really so? After all, everyone knows something about him, even if it is only at second hand. On the level of Proust the person, the (in)famous cork-lined room he inhabited for a number of years is deemed to epitomise an ivory-tower existence far removed from the harshness of everyday life. The fact is, of course, he lived on the bustling street side of a modern building in the heart of the business and social district of the Parisian right bank, and was in rapid and frequent contact with the world outside. He even had a telephone, a means of communication he would memorably immortalise in his novel. Installing the cork was only intended to be a temporary measure, to shield him from builders hammering away in the next apartment. Not much of an ivory tower, really. But the elitist image is surprisingly persistent, and still biases opinion: Proust, in moving in high bourgeois and aristocratic circles, and in dealing with them in his novel, is assumed to be a snob, not an appropriate stance from which to speak with universal authority. And of course his demeanor as a sickly individual, sexually suspect, sleeping during the day and 'working' at night, is frowned upon: these are not features which add up to greatness. Being wealthy, too, is a distinct disadvantage on this score: as one of the 'idle rich', Proust can hardly be expected to speak for the generality of human beings.

Proust's Narrator is the successor to a long line of heroes in European fiction who mirror the author's sensibility and reflect his conception of reality. This mirror is different however. The central character in A la recherche du temps perdu is more akin to Flaubert's and Stendhal's characters who reflect their inner vision of the world outside them, than to the robust actors of La Comédie humaine whose physical image is inseparable from the reality they represent. The psychological analysis of Proust's fictional hero reaches into the cocoon of sensations, impressions and reflections which inform his view of himself as an artist. It is they which furnish the key to the Narrator's personality. If we wish to understand him we must look into his mirror, share the images swirling around in his imagination and unravel the process by which they form patterns which will turn into a work of artistic creation. The path down which the reader is led is the same as that which the central character himself follows without realising it. The originality of the portrait lies in the fact that the novelist he becomes at the end of A la recherche du temps perdu relives his transformation and shares it with the reader without damaging the chrysalis from which he is emerging.

Near the middle of 'Combray', the opening section of Proust's Search, the Narrator describes the exceptional after-dinner walks the Protagonist and his parents used to take on beautiful May evenings. His father would lead them far out into the countryside as darkness was falling and then suddenly ask, 'Where are we?' (I, 113; I, 136/160). After his mother invariably acknowledged that she was utterly lost, her amused husband would point out that they were standing right in front of their lower garden gate: by a gently circuitous route, he had led them home in the dark. 'You're extraordinary!' the wife would exclaim admiringly. The Protagonist would stand silent, attentive to how the forbidding world of unfamiliar shadows around him was now transforming itself under his feet into the welcoming garden of his childhood.

No novelist could compose such an incident of getting lost and finding one’s way again without thinking about how to tell a story and its effect on the reader. In this case, the father’s surefooted navigation stands for Proust’s confidence about the direction and outcome of his story. ‘You may think you’ve lost your way in my narrative, but I know exactly where I’m taking you.’ We are, of course, still close to the opening.

British psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips has suggested that “the contingent self enjoins us to imagine a life without blaming, a life exempt from the languages of effort and self-control.” To live a life without blame, and to be exempt from the language of self-control, ought to be good things. Much may be said in favor of flirtation, with its tolerations, and Phillips says it well. But notice the equation, by apposition, that informs his remarks: effort and self-control seem somehow essentially to involve blame - blame of others and of oneself. The contingent self Phillips is concerned to advance is in certain respects the opposite of the responsible self, at least from the point of view of conventional society, which is why it is usually something of a scandal. The contingent self really isn't, then, a “self” at all, as that term is properly understood. In any case, it is not a self in the legal sense: hence the concept of the “diminished capacity” of selves made contingent by neglect, abuse, insanity, poverty, immaturity. An ethics founded on the contingent self diminishes everyone's capacity: to do wrong, to be punished, to be condemned. Its language is always the language of mercy, which brings us to Robert Frost.

The promotion in Proust's novel of inner psychological states is regularly reinforced by the Narrator's pronouncements on their importance. Thus our social life stands ostensibly as inferior to the intricate workings of private memory; time spent in society is deemed wasted, whereas according time to introspective contemplation is commended. The aesthetic solutions proposed in Le Temps retrouvé confirm this assumption. The fact that the Narrator, through involuntary memory, rediscovers his private past that is now to be immortalised in the work of art reinforces the view that the internal psychological ruminations of the Narrator should override the social. Reflecting on friendship, which signals the social, the Narrator protests that the self loses its true orientation, becoming 'hospitalisé dans une individualité étrangère' (ii, 689) ['hospitalised in an extraneous individuality' (iii, 456/541)].