One thing we can now surely say of the achievement of Wallace Stevens: He has written, over some thirty years, a whole and continuing poetry whose subject is the life, the form and function, of the imagination. In the recently published Transport to Summer that subject receives its broadest, most complex treatment, yet remains essentially as it was in his first volume, Harmonium: in his language, a problem in the relation of the imagined to the real; in more general language, of the world as known to the world as outside knowing. From beginning to end what has been basic is the predicament of the man who would know. If, read in and of themselves, the poems in Transport to Summer contrast vividly with those in Harmonium, the contrast is as much an aspect of continuity as of difference and opposition. It is a continuity that represents the growth and achievement which, for good and for bad, make the total of Stevens' work greater than the sum of its parts. Viewed thus, the poems in Transport to Summer are inevitable precisely as they show Stevens trying to finish what he began in Harmonium.

It is well known that D. H. Lawrence was an unsparing rewriter of his fiction, and the tradition persists that “he could never revise, he could only rewrite.” Yet, although he rewrote a number of poems, as he did his short stories and novels, he revised many more—nearly all of them, in fact, either before or after publication. His most concentrated period of activity as a poetic reviser was the winter of 1927–28, when he collected his poems for the publisher Martin Seeker, and he remarked at this time that he felt “like an autumn morning, a perfect maze of gossamer of rhythms and rhymes and loose lines floating in the air.” No wonder he felt this way, for he had been altering rhythms, rhymes, single words, and punctuation in addition to rewriting whole stanzas and sometimes whole poems. In a few weeks he altered the face of his early poems as drastically as the arch-revisers Wordsworth and Tennyson altered theirs in the course of many years.

When the Browning collections were sold in 1913, the sale catalogue listed about 140 letters from Browning and “upwards of one hundred letters” from Mrs. Browning to Miss Isa Blagden, “perhaps the Brownings' most intimate friend in Florence.” According to the copy of the catalogue in the University of Tennessee Library, these letters were sold to Fairfax Murray for 360. The letters from Browning have been accounted for and published, but the greater part of those from Mrs. Browning are now missing. Sir Frederic Kenyon included twenty-five of these in his Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1897), although he omitted passages from these letters and indicated his omissions with ellipses. Sir Frederic has called my attention to the typescript which he prepared for his edition and later deposited in the British Museum (Add. MSS. 42229–31). The typescript contains the omitted passages and, in addition, nine unpublished letters from Mrs. Browning to Miss Blagden. The nine unpublished letters and two of the omitted passages are here presented.

When Herman Melville was twenty years old he started on a trip which was to give him a massive store of detail and imagery for books which he had not yet begun to write. This journey was not one of the sea voyages for which he is so well known; it was an inland trip into the new and exciting trans-Allegheny America, to the very edge of the frontier as it existed in 1840. This early western trip, however, was sandwiched in rather obscurely between two ocean voyages, one to Liverpool in 1839 and the other aboard the whaler Acushnet in 1841; very little is really known about it at present. In writing a sketch about his uncle Thomas Melvill (sic) who moved in his latter years to Galena, Illinois, Melville said, “In 1841 [more probably 1840] I visited my now venerable kinsman in his western home.” This allusion, made known only in 1947, constitutes the core of the external evidence of the journey. It is my intention here to use the internal evidence from Melville's work to reconstruct his trip to and from Galena, and to indicate the extensive use of western imagery throughout his writing, imagery which very possibly was suggested from personal observation. It is well known, of course, that Melville made continuous and skillful use of other people's books, and no one can say with certainty whether or not any one of his western allusions was the result of first-hand experience. Yet it is common sense to assume that such a trip occurring at the time that it did in his life and in the life of America must have made a lasting impression on him, and that when he began to write he had little need to borrow what he already owned in abundance.

When Melville bought an English translation of Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique early in 1849, he obviously anticipated—with mock alarm—an “influence.” He wrote Evert Duyck-inck, in whose library he may have come across it earlier: “I bought a set of Bayle's Dictionary the other day, & on my return to New York I intend to lay the great old folios side by side & go to sleep on them thro' the summer, with the Phaedon in one hand & Tom Brown in the other.” It was, of course, a moment for influences, the most receptive and most productive period of Melville's life. That year, he saw Mardi and Redburn into print, and made the memorable trip to England with the MS. of White Jacket. A few months later he moved to the Berkshires, where he met Hawthorne and began work on a new book about a whaling voyage. Though we hear no more of Bayle's Dictionary we can feel sure that the program of summer reading was carried out. I shall show how pervasive were its effects on Moby Dick.

In the winter of 1843–44 Henry Norman Hudson, a Yankee schoolteacher in Alabama, began a series of Shakespearean lectures in Huntsville, Alabama. After repeating the lectures in Mobile and, in the spring, in Cincinnati, he moved on to Boston the following winter, “where the lectures were listened to by large and intelligent audiences, bringing the author both fame and profit.” From Boston he turned to other cities for single lectures or courses of lectures: Emerson pressed “Mr. Hudson's claims on the Curators” of the Concord Lyceum and Hudson lectured to Concord on Macbeth, 1 January 1845; the literati of New York were stirred into one of their innumerable controversies by his relatively unsuccessful course of lectures there in the winter and spring of 1845. Horace Howard Furness in later years remembered “the enthusiasm which attended his early course of lectures in Philadelphia and the unexampled crowds which attended them.” In short, according to his friend A. J. George, “Hudson soon became as popular as Emerson himself in lecture courses in all the great cities.”

Tennyson once remarked that he had been nearer thirty than twenty before he was anything of an artist, and his 1842 poems, which were his first mature publication, pre-eminently reflect an assiduous artistic novitiate. They have also been alleged to show how early he began that feeble self-adjustment to public taste which supposedly undermined his genius. Since they did appeal more directly than their predecessors of 1830 and 1832 to the prepossessions of the middle-class reader, and since they were produced during the years when he was supposedly kept silent by critical hostility, the disinterestedness of the 1842 volumes can plausibly be suspected. Yet important though it is to know how far this charge is justified, no adequate enquiry has as yet been made into the influence exerted on them by the reviews, for the statistics which must be thoroughly sifted before any reliable verdict can be reached have been over-simplified in the only two detailed enquiries which have as yet been published.3

In beginning a discussion of the structure of Rasselas one need not spend much time clearing the ground of previous arguments before advancing one's own. What the new commentator must face—and this is perhaps more disturbing than arguments would be—is the almost universal opinion that Rasselas has only the slightest structure and that the little it does have results from Johnson's not too successful effort to write an ordinary novel or “oriental tale.” The narrative is “episodic,” unimportant, dull, say some critics; the ending concludes nothing, the work merely stops. The action—and some of the characters —say others, lack dramatic power. At the same time that they thus observe, either directly or indirectly, the tale's failure to conform to their notions of what the structure should be, most commentators recognize a fundamental difference between Johnson's piece and those works in the light of which they attempt to judge Rasselas. Wishing to make the difference clear and to do justice to what they feel is a manifest accomplishment, they praise the wisdom set forth in the book and the skill and power displayed in individual chapters.

“Voltaire'S tales,” asserts Norman L. Torrey, “have a way . . . of summing up certain periods of his existence and certain problems with which he was then faced” (Spirit of Voltaire, New York, 1938, p. 50). In the case of Candide, the period was the decade of the fifties; the central problem, that of human conduct in relation to the somber mystery of physical and social evil. And it is an eloquent testimony to the distinctiveness and realism of its content that, viewed as a whole, Candide pursues a course of intellectual argument which parallels the evolution of Voltaire's cultural attitude during that decade—a decade wherein the most illustrious personality of a highly optimistic age irrevocably abandoned the relative complacency of his earlier years, inclined toward pessimism, and finally won through to a melioristic affirmation.

In the midst of the large passionateness of Gulliver's Travels it is something of a shock to come upon the passage near the beginning of the Voyage to Laputa: “I OBSERVED among them a Dutchman, who seemed to be of some Authority, although he were not the Commander of either Ship. He knew us by our Countenances to be Englishmen, and jabbering to us in his own Language, swore we should be Tyed Back to Back, and thrown into the Sea.” He continues to be vindictive until Gulliver gets into the canoe: “while the Dutchman, standing upon the Deck, loaded me with all the Curses and injurious Terms his Language could afford.” Swift emphasizes his cruelty by contrast with the lenity of the Japanese pirates. The idea that Dutch Christianity is a mockery suggested by this contrast with the heathen pirates is intensified at the end of the book when Gulliver pretending to be a Hollander yet contrives to avoid trampling on the crucifix, so that the Emperor began to doubt “whether I were a real Hollander or no; but rather suspected I must be a CHRISTIAN. However, for the Reasons I had offered, but chiefly to gratify the King of Luggnagg, by an uncommon Mark of his Favour he would comply with the Singularity of my Humour; but the Affair must be managed with Dexterity, and his Officers should be commanded to let me pass as it were by Forgetfulness. For he assured me, that if the secret should be discovered by my Countrymen, the Dutch, they would cut my Throat in the Voyage” (200–201). Such venom against a particular nation is out of keeping with Swift's claim that the same vices and follies obtain in every civilized country of Europe and that all are equally indicted in his work. Furthermore, it interrupts the artistic scheme which demands that the satire, both general and particular, be digested into the allegory. Swift's rancor against the Dutch must have had a peculiar force to make him thus break the announced largeness of his plan of vexing the world rather than particular nations and break also the artistic pattern of his mockery.

Manuscript 3726 in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid contains two unpublished documents concerned with the controversy that raged over the poetry of Luis de Gongora: the Antidoto contra la pestilente Poesia de las Soledades, aplicado a su Autor, para defenderle de si mismo; and the Annotaciones y defensas a la primera Soledad de Don Luis de Gongora by Pedro Diaz de Rivas. It is the purpose of this study to discuss these documents in terms of the new light which they shed on one aspect of this controversy.

Modern readers are prone to find the tragedy of Brutus in his incorruptible devotion to high principle and fair play. Many members of the Globe audience, however, could see in him not only magnanimity but rich complications of misplaced sincerity and self-deception. For in sixteenth-century views of Roman history the conspiracy against Caesar often exemplified a flouting of unitary sovereignty, that prime point of Tudor policy, and thus was bound to end in the anarchy thought to accompany “democratic” or constitutional checks upon authority. Certain judgments of Elizabethan political writers who refer to Brutus are quite clear upon this point. Although naturally aware of the honor and liberality shown by Brutus, Shakespeare's contemporaries could thus perceive in him a conflict between questionable goals and honorable action, a contradiction lying in his attempt to redeem morally confused ends by moral clarity of means. As with Othello, the Elizabethan tragedy of Brutus is one of confusion, of integrity and plain dealing which not only accompany the protagonist into evil but continue to reassure him in his error.

Commentators on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, in addressing themselves to a variety of problems, have arrived at equally varied conclusions about the quality of the play. Behind all of these comments, however, whether favorable or unfavorable, lies one common assumption: that the play, on the surface at least, is not entirely satisfactory and therefore requires a somewhat exceptional elucidation. It is conceded even by defenders of the play that there are apparent moral inconsistencies which need to be resolved, that many questionable actions must be accounted for if the Duke and Isabella are to be saved as completely “good” characters. For example, attention is frequently called to the shifty delays and intrigues of the Duke, to Isabella's self-righteous prudery which would at once sacrifice a brother—indeed would violently damn him for asking her to yield her virginity to save him—and sanction the substitution of Mariana for herself. Also there is some question whether the play conforms adequately to a legitimate dramatic genre. Shakespeare has been charged with taking the stuff of tragedy and forcing it into the mold of comedy by asking his audience to accept Angelo's last-minute repentance and marriage to Mariana. Finally, there are certain apparent inconsistencies in the dramatic action, which suggest to some commentators a possible corruption of the text. For example, at the beginning of the play the Duke characterizes Angelo as without blemish; yet later he reveals that Angelo wrongly deserted Mariana before the start of the action. Similarly, Mariana states that she has often been comforted by Friar Lodowick (the disguised Duke), although we know that the Duke has just adopted this disguise.

Guillén de Castro in his Mocedades del Cid presents us with a characterization of his hero which differs radically from the Cid of the Romancero and the Crónicas. He transforms the renowned medieval warrior into a courtly knight. Ernest Mérimée in the Première Partie des Mocedades del Cid de Guillen de Castro (Toulouse, 1890, page cvi) takes note of the metamorphosis and attributes it to the playwright's inventive genius. But in his brochure, The Cid Theme in France in 1600 (Minneapolis, 1920), Gustave L. Van Robsbroeck casts some doubt on this point of view by bringing to light a novel by Antoine Du Périer, La Eayne et l'Amour d'Arnoul et de Clayremonde (Paris, 1600), containing features similar to the Castro story including the element of courtliness, which, of course, obviously antedate the play. His conclusion is that “There existed a common source—probably a Spanish source—for both the Eayne et L'Amour d'Arnoul et de Clayremonde and Las Mocedades del Cid” (p. 15). Barbara Matulka further enlarges on the subject in her The Cid as a Courtly Hero: from Amadis to Corneille (New York, 1928, pp. 6–40). She notes an early treatment of the courtly Cid theme in Feliciano de Silva's Florisel de Niquea (1532–51) representing books x, xi, and xii of the Amadis series, and cites Jimenez de Ayllon's Los Famosos y Herôicos Hechos del Invencible Cavallero el Cid Ruy Diaz de Bivar (1568) to show that the Cid had been introduced to court prior to the Mocedades and to point out that Ayllon's epic contains situations and details similar to those found in the play. These works, Miss Matulka claims, have been influential through intermediary links between them and our dramatic piece. There is no question but that she is partially correct in her contention, and this we shall endeavor to prove through the discussion of materials which she failed to utilize at the time she made her investigation.

The meaning of the four dialogues entitled Cymbalum mundi (published in 1537) is still enigmatic and it is to be feared that the aura of mystery which hovers over this witty, graceful work of incipient French humanism has repelled many readers whereas the Joyeux devis et nouvelles récréactions of the same author have, from La Fontaine to the present day, found a sympathetically appreciative public. It is our conviction that when some of the clouds which weigh heavily on the Cymbalum have been dispersed, this work, so full of genuine esprit gaulois and of a levity borrowed from Greece, will emerge in its true light.

Those who have suggested theories of the number of days Chaucer intended the pilgrimage in the Canterbury Tales to last have either confined themselves to a consideration of the journey to Canterbury or have assumed that it would take the pilgrims the same length of time for their return. Thus Miss Rickert, finding that groups such as the one described by Chaucer ordinarily traveled thirty miles in a day, “insisted on two days each way.” And Manly, after discussing the time it took the pilgrims to reach Canterbury and arriving at no definite conclusion, decided that the question was of no importance, “since the whole conception of a series of tales told while riding by so large a group of pilgrims is, however entertaining, entirely unrealistic.” The conception, though perhaps unrealistic, has been accepted by generations of readers as thoroughly as any artistic postulate. The stage of the Canterbury Tales is the road from London to Canterbury, and the acts of the finished work would have been the days of the pilgrimage. The evidence for Chaucer's intentions is slight, yet, with the confirmation provided by contemporaries familiar with conditions of pilgrimage, it is sufficient to indicate a five-day journey.

Of the seventeen tragedies which Chaucer's Monk bewails, seven (or eight, if Lucifer merits inclusion in the category) have as protagonists characters drawn from the Bible. It has generally been assumed that for the greater part of the Biblical information in The Monk's Tale Chaucer used the Vulgate, while he gleaned a few details from Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum et Feminarum Illustrium, which served as model for the collection of tragedies. There are, however, in Chaucer's work various divergencies from, or augmentations of, the Biblical narratives which can be explained neither by the Vulgate nor by the Boccaccean collection. In an article entitled “Vincent of Beauvais and Chaucer's Monks Tale,” Miss Pauline Aiken has presented her theory that the influence of Vincent's Speculum Eistoriale may be detected in eight of the Monk's tragedies, but that “among the sources of this tale the first place is to be assigned to the Vulgate Bible.” I should like to propose another source for the Biblical portions of The Monk's Tale: a French version of the Scriptures, the Bible Eistoriale of Guyart Desmoulins.

Ever since 1879, when Arthur Fritzsche in his discussion of the authorship of Andreas suggested that the Old English religious poem was heavily indebted to Beowulf for its military and seafaring elements, scholars have generally assumed that the Andreas poet not only used Beowulf as a model for his life of St. Andrew but also consciously borrowed therefrom numerous phrases in order to adorn his work with the military spirit of the heroic poem. George Philip Krapp, in his edition of Andreas, discusses at some length the general similarities between Andreas and Beowulf, and then gives as evidence of literary indebtedness the impressive number of approximately 145 verbal parallels to Beowulf distributed throughout Andreas. Klaeber, without reservation, agrees with the conclusions of Krapp; he remarks in his edition of Beowulf that “the legend of Andreas exhibits abundant and unmistakable signs of having been written with Beowulf as a model. Wholesale borrowing of phrases, which more than once are forced into a strange context, and various parallelisms in situations and the general heroic conception of the story leave no shadow of a doubt that the author of the religious poem was following in the footsteps of the great secular epic.”

In the physiological study of speech articulations our most objective information has come, until recently, from radiograms. Now we have, in addition, spectrograms, which, if we learn to interpret them, can also give us very objective information. For the typical phase (portion) of a speech sound, the interest of a spectrogram may be about equal to that of a radiogram; but for the transitional phases, the interest of a spectrogram will probably be much superior; and from the practical viewpoint of availability, the spectrogram will have a marked advantage for it can be had in a few minutes and at low cost. But to the linguist, the usefulness of a spectrogram depends on his ability to interpret it in articulatory terms. We need not stress, therefore, the importance of investigating the relation between formant positions and speech organ positions at this stage of the still young science of sound spectrography.