“The American Scholar” (1837) grew organically out of Emerson's thinking about his own vocation after he left the pulpit and began secular lecturing in 1833. The scholar described first in his journal is like Emerson himself at the time, an inactive observer or “Watcher” preparing himself for some still-undefined public service. Later, Emerson developed his ideal figure of “the true scholar” as a writer and teacher who actively guides and inspires mankind, just as he hoped to do when composing his first book, Nature, in 1836. The scholar as Emerson draws him is successively the “intellectual” or “spiritual” man, “the great Thinker” who “thinks for all,” and finally the type of Emerson's Universal Man. As “Man Thinking” the scholar is neither a narrow specialist nor the parrot of other men's thoughts; he exemplifies “the active soul” by creatively transforming temporal events into timeless truth. It is self-reliant originality and creativity, the objects of Emerson's own dedication, that became the central themes of the oration as he shaped it during July and August of 1837.

Earlier writers have erroneously assumed that Symbolism exercised a significant influence on the Imagist aesthetic. Hulme and Pound derived their conceptions of the image from the writings of French psychologists and philosophers. In the empiricist-associationist psychological tradition (represented in the writings of Taine and Théodule Ribot), I'image corresponds to David Hume's “impression”: it is the mental representation of sensory experience, the virtues of which are clarity, precision, and complexity (as opposed to the vagueness and simplicity of ideas). Hulme read works by Taine and Ribot, and his “Notes on Language and Style” embodies their theory of the image. Pound's conception of the image is similar to that contained in Ribot's Essai sur I'imagination créatrice. After 1908, Hulme adopted Bergson's organicist theory of the image; for Bergson, l'image was the linguistic embodiment of intuition. Imagism was not the culmination of the Romanticist aesthetic, as some critics have argued; it was the first attempt to transcend the subject-object dichotomy of nineteenth-century poetic theory.

The recurrent euphoria of the lyric speaker who addresses the mysterious beloved in La voz a ti debida establishes love as the keynote of the work. The poet strives for and falls in love with love itself. Reacting against a tangible world which has no meaning for him, he seeks instead the mysterious and the ineffable, musing on his beloved's reality, searching for that reality, and struggling against a void. This conception of love is manifest in the theme, structure, and images of each poem. In the first verse, “Cuando tu me eligiste” the three moments–before (chaos and confusion), now (vital plenitude and enthusiasm) and after (deception and return to gray uniformity) –are distinguished by varying images and poetic tones. Joy is dominant in the second offering, “Qué alegría vivir / sintiendose vivido!” and is thematically justified because the lyricist's amorous fulfillment prevents the anguish of nothingness and the threat of death, and affirms love's power. The poem's structure is parallelistic, based on the two types of existence. His is unreal and banal; hers is real and meaningful. The movement of the poem leads to the joining together of the lover and the beloved and culminates in their mystic union at the poem's center. The images are ethereal and provide an example of a “poetics of verticality.” (In Spanish)

In Michael Kohlhaas, Kleist brings two kinds of law, human and extra-human, into conflict with each other. Kohlhaas, denied the protection of the written law, is driven to rebellion. Simultaneously, he gains the aid of the laws of fate through the gypsy soothsayer, who is an agent of Nemesis, goddess of justice. Kohlhaas is associated with the animal figures in the work, the horses and the stag, in his virtual death at the hands of men and his return from the dead with the aid of supernatural law to wreak his inhuman vengeance on the Elector of Saxony. The latter is depicted as a pragmatist whose attempts to deal with Kohlhaas within the rational written law are doomed from the start. It is the basic tragedy of the work that the rational ruler and his passionate subject are drawn into mortal conflict with each other because each operates according to a different kind of law. This underlying conflict between human and extra-human justice accounts for the paradox and irony, as well as for the complex plotting, of the work. Kleist creates an ambiguous world in which all the figures, including the judges and the judged, are at once innocent and guilty.

Hermann Broch's lofty conception of the artist as seer and prophet led him to sketch out new paths for the future, absolute values for a “new society.” Thus, the theme of salvation plays a key role in his works, from the first novel in 1932 to the last completed in 1950. Broch's conception of salvation connotes not only the saving of man from the spiritual consequences of sin, but also from existential anguish. Broch presents a number of solutions, often embodied in archetypal savior figures, for the plight of modern society; they range from vast mystical visions (in Der Tod des Vergil) to utopian plans in the empirical realm. A central theme in Broch's novels is that salvation can be achieved through attainment of ultimate knowledge which emerges from Dionysiac depths but which must be structured by reason. In the ethical aspect of Broch's treatment of the salvation theme, one can discern a possible trend in the later works toward a strict form of moral activism and humanitarianism.

Coriolanus is one of the several plays in which Shakespeare explores the ways in which man's presentation of himself balances precariously on the seesaw of tragic and comic modes. Coriolanus, by the very intensity with which he asserts masculine independence from circumstance, binds himself to maintain a public and self-image of an almost Godlike warrior, but his uncontrollable need to maintain this image denies its truth. From this paradox emerge the opposite views of Coriolanus presented in the play: Roman patriot and traitor, man of ultimate modesty and braggart, most manly of warriors and boy. Furthermore, the play shows us how all these straining oppositions rise from his denial of that human tenderness in himself that is barely manifested by his love of Virgilia. Having denied his inner feeling, he must model himself on external expectations, thereby rendering his actions and reactions predictable. This predictability makes it possible for others to manipulate Coriolanus. We are, therefore, forced to see him in the coloring of a Bergsonian automaton, even though the grandeur of his stance and the consequences of it make this perception tragically painful.

Milton uses the contrast between “plain” or “unpoetic” speech and “ornate” or “obviously poetic” speech as an important resource for presenting to the reader of Paradise Lost the difference between perfection and imper fection, innocence and corruption. The poem associates rhetoric, oratory, and most ornamental verbal contrivances with Satan and the fallen angels, and the contrast between their style and the bare and unemotional dialogue in Heaven is intended to make the reader suspect the arts of language as devices for concealing or manipulating the truth instead of stating or revealing it. The speeches of the unfallen Adam and Eve treat words as a set of counters for the truths of the created universe, but after the fall they, like the fallen angels, use language in ways which imply that its correspondence to the “truths” of the universe is a matter for speculation. When Adam and Eve are reconciled with each other and to God, their speeches contain striking reminders of the style of the Son in Book in. Of course, all the effects of Paradise Lost, both plain and ornate, are artful, but the criticism of reliance on persuasive and immediately appealing styles implied by the structure of the poem may help to explain Milton's deliberate forgoing of such effects in Books xi and xii and in Paradise Regain'd.

To understand the ironic force of Johnson's 1755 letter to the Earl of Chesterfield, we must appreciate not only their personal relationship, centered in 1746-48, and Chesterfield's indirect attempt to sponsor the Dictionary in 1754, but their literary and political relationship as well. Both men played a complex role in the politics of the 1737-44 period, Chesterfield as a leading member of the opposition, Johnson as political journalist. During these years, Johnson used Chesterfield's 1737 speech against the Playhouse Bill as basis for some arguments in his Compleat Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage (1739), and later wrote Chesterfield's part in a number of “Parliamentary Debates.” Though Johnson favored the opposition position before 1740, in his “Debates,” under the requirement of appearing impartial, he often created for opposition speakers, especially Chesterfield, ironic arguments which redound to their discredit. Johnson's ability as ironist was considerable: comparison of the speeches he wrote for Chesterfield with collateral sources for these debates reveals that he intensified Chesterfield's opposition negativeness by increasing his ironical attacks upon the ministry in power. The effect is to satirize Chesterfield, rendering him ineffectual, divisive, and ridiculous through the creation of a literary and political persona. It is unlikely that Johnson forgot this persona during his hopeful personal relationship with and later neglect by Chesterfield. When the opportunity arose in 1755 for Johnson to address Chesterfield personally again, he fortified the “civil irony” of his celebrated letter with an ironic attack which recalls, and was perhaps influenced by, the satiric criticism he had leveled against Chesterfield through similar ironic techniques a dozen years earlier in the “Parliamentary Debates.”

In the eighteenth century a preference for Juvenal as a satirist eventually replaced the normal Augustan preference for Horace. But the post-Augustan image of Juvenal was selective and sometimes inaccurate. Critics emphasized his sublimity, his occasional pathos, and his supposedly rational piety, while ignoring his obscenity, wit, and rhetorical control. There are near parallels in post-Augustan satiric practice. In William Gifford, satire becomes invective; in Charles Churchill, declamation. The new satire borders on Richardsonian and even Gothic melodrama. Or, at the other extreme, it is pseudo-Horatian and almost at the vanishing point (Christopher Anstey's New Bath Guide). The mock-heroic dwindles into burlesque (Peter Pindar's The Lousiad). The breakdown of the Augustan equilibrium means, in satire, a progressive failure of irony and especially of ironic diminution. Churchill's Dedication to Warburton is an important exception. It uses the new image of Juvenal in the service of mock-panegyric and enforces the Augustan satirist's traditional view of evil as privation.

Keats often imagines the poetic process (the way poetry is created or conceived) as a flight from reality to some dreamworld of imagination. At other times it seems an identification with and heightening of the concrete and actual. What mediates between these two apparently contradictory views of aesthetic experience are certain fundamental analogies borrowed from contemporary science, in particular chemistry, that underlie his whole view of the poetic imagination and its operation. Keats's favorite metaphors for poetic creation reveal how the imagination transmutes material phenomena or sensations into poetic or “essential” form in accordance with the principles of ethereal chemistry described by such a writer as Sir Humphry Davy and by a process remarkably akin to that of chemical distillation. The essential forms of poetry derive their reality both from the identity of material phenomena and the transforming power of the mind. Later, however, Keats's attitude toward this process undergoes a notable change. Thus the Hermes episode in Lamia can be read as a parody of his whole earlier sense of the poetic process and its authenticity. Keats's knowledge of and reliance on science becomes an integral part of the more ambivalent view of poetry that characterizes his later career.

The history of the piracy of Dickens' humorous works in the New York Spirit op the Times shows that both his presence in and his disappearance from the paper contributed to the shape of early comic realism in America. The Spirit (1831-61) is generally thought to have been devoted to the tall tales and humorous yarns of the South and Southwest, but its editor, William T. Porter, also pirated British serials such as Pickwick just when potential American humorists were beginning to read and contribute to the Spirit. The evidence in the journal indicates that they deliberately imitated Dickens. After the publication of American Notes, letters to the editor violently attacking Dickens reveal some acute American sensitivities of the period. When Porter saw that American Notes was creating a controversy, he stopped pirating Dickens' works and encouraged his contributors as humorists in their own right. Thus Dickens inadvertently played an influential role in what is usually thought of as a purely native American literary genre.

An analysis of the multiple versions of many of the novel's events contained in E. M. Forster's manuscript of A Passage to India increases our understanding of the published work. Examining his changes in the “Caves” and “Temple” material supports the notion that the novel is a philosophic one, whose themes were in Forster's mind from the beginning–largely as a result of his Indian experiences–but whose dramatic structure was developed slowly as he sought to create characters who would animate his ideas. Thus, the nihilistic message of the Marabar Caves–that “everything exists, nothing has value”–is substantially the same in even the earliest version, only there it is the schoolmaster Fielding, rather than Mrs. Moore, who encounters this bleak pronouncement. Since such a vision could never alter Fielding's admirable yet limited humanism in any significant respect, Forster decided to have Mrs. Moore enter the cave instead. In the published work, Mrs. Moore emerges in a dominant role as a disillusioned mystic after her earlier MS beginnings as a conventional, God-fearing Christian lady.

Marcel Proust stated clearly and repeatedly in his vast A la recherche du temps perdu his determining theory of involuntary memory. Proust's entire work was based upon experiences of total recall from a store of memories unconsciously preserved in the mind. In a paper delivered in 1957 by Dr. Wilder Penfield of the Montreal Neurological Institute are to be found physiological bases for Proust's esthetic experiences. Wilder reported that forgotten experiences were revealed to patients in great detail when electrodes were applied to various parts of their brains. Penfield thus supports Proust's view of a stream of memories (or, as Penfield calls it, a continuous filmstrip) preserving an individual's total experiential responses from childhood onward. The juxtaposition of Proust's statements with those of the neurosurgeon about the nature of this stream of unconscious memories, their relation to conscious memory, and the conditions under which they are recalled throws light upon the validity of Proust's technique.

It is inaccurate to maintain (see Joseph J. Moldenhauer, PMLA, lxxxiii, 1968, 284-297) that Edgar Allan Poe's vision of death and dissolution is totally ecstatic and beatific simply because the metaphysical and esthetic “Unity” presented by death is part of the basic “design” of the Universe as Poe conceived it. Instead, the esthetic cosmology of Eureka and the implicit themes of other of Poe's works, especially Pym, “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” present a tension between hope and despair, reason and madness, Divine Purpose and seeming Nothingness which must be called “skeptical.”