In his appreciative portrait of Theodore Dreiser, Ford Madox Ford recorded how in 1914, long before they ever met, he had read with emotion Dreiser's novel, The Titan, and then had written a laudatory review of it. Six months later in this country Dreiser read Ford's new novel, The Good Soldier, also with emotion and also to write a review. Here the similarity ends, however, for Dreiser was irritated by Ford's novel and especially by the portrayal of John Dowell, an expatriate from Philadelphia in “the United States of North America” (p. 60). This character, claimed Dreiser, “is no American. He is that literary packhorse or scapegoat,” the “Englishman's conception of an American husband.” In a sense this is quite true. No American would make the comment that Dowell does in analyzing his wife: “She did not want much physical passion in the affair. Americans, you know, can envisage such unions without blinking” (p. 79). Obviously such a conception, if taken as an attempt to state the literal truth about this country, must have sounded to a contemporary reader as though its author's acquaintance with America were limited to the novels of Henry James. Actually, of course, as an impressionist novel The Good Soldier does not intend to give a literal representation of the problem it explores. And since, as Ford emphasized in his portrait, he and Dreiser were temperamentally different, we should not be surprised at Dreiser's irritation or his final complaint that the novel as a whole is “cold narrative and never truly poignant” because the “formal British leanings” of the author “will not let him loosen up and sing.”

“Robert Louis Stevenson's earliest preserved efforts at musical composition are contained in two manuscript books owned by the Huntington Library in California and date from his thirty-first year, the year Treasure Island was completed. But almost a decade earlier he confessed that music had already become his ”consuming passion.“ From Frankfort in 1872 he had written home telling of his ”terrible excitement“ at a performance of Halévy's La Juive, and adding: “An opera is far more real than real life to me… It seems as if… opera would never stale upon me.” The next winter back in Edinburgh he heard his first Beethoven quartet, and with typical impetuosity forsook his love of opera for other loves. Later he was to write from Saranac Lake: “Wealth is only useful for two things—a yacht and a string quartette. For these two I will sell my soul. Except for these, I hold that £700 a year is as much as anybody can possibly want.”

Perhaps no other French poem of recent times has been so much discussed, commented on, and analyzed as Arthur Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre. Hence it may seem presumptuous on my part to propose to the reader another lengthy discussion of a work about which “everything has been said.” If I do so, it is because of a conviction that much remains still to be said. For whereas there have been proposals for the total reading of the poem which seem to be generally acceptable, these usually fail to do more than suggest the broad general meaning; they do not provide insights into specific passages or solutions to the many difficulties of detail. Moreover, they tend to concentrate on the problem of meaning to the exclusion of the problem of structure, and it is in the problem of structure that I am especially interested. I should wish to discover, in the following pages, not only a more nearly complete reading of Le Bateau Ivre but also the answer (or part of the answer) to a theoretical question that constantly arises in the analysis of symbolist poetry. The problem simply stated is this: How much of a symbolist poem is actually involved in the central symbol about which the poem is built, and what purpose is served by such parts of the poem as are not involved in that symbol? Hence my subtitle, “The Limits of Symbolism,” which does not mean to impose limits upon the poet or to suggest that any such exist in the nature of things, but merely to inquire into the operation of these limits in the case of Le Bateau Ivre.

Despite an occasional reluctance to talk about his own poetry, Whitman has said a good deal about what he felt were its sources, methods and purposes, both in his conversations and in his Prefaces. However, if we try to apply any of his ideas we always have to contend with his theoretical vagueness and his antiaestheticism. Thus, though much has been revealed about the nature of Whitman's “art” by examinations of ideas he claimed as sources (e.g. the sea, the city, the Bible, even phrenology), one wants a closer analysis of his claims and of critics' applications of them, especially in relation to a reading of particular poems. An area of Whitman criticism in which one feels a special need for clarification is that which treats the influence of music on his poetry.

Among the manuscripts and typescripts left by W. B. Yeats in the possession of his wife are two unpublished plays, one an unfinished manuscript consisting of two dialogues written in Yeats's inimitable, nearly undecipherable handwriting and the other a rough typescript inaccurately punctuated and proofread. The first was written in 1918 during the period of Yeats's interest in the Noh drama and has to do with a young girl, who lives as a goatherd in an old tower on a hill, and her lover, whose mother wants to block their marriage. This play is mentioned by Birgit Bjersby (though she makes an inaccurate quotation from the MS.) in her study of the Cuchulain legend in Yeats's works. The second play has been mentioned, as far as I know, only by Allen Wade. It is of interest chiefly for three reasons. First, it forms a dramatic milieu for “The Happy Townland,” a poem which Yeats liked well enough to preserve in his Collected Poems. Second, it throws some light upon Yeatsian symbology. And third, it is an example of a collaboration between Yeats and Lady Gregory. Allen Wade mentions this play only to assert that it evidently no longer exists. But four years ago a typescript of the play was shown to me by Mrs. Yeats. I found it to be a variation upon Lady Gregory's play, The Travelling Man.

Writers of genius inevitably impel us to seek the sources of their inspiration. This is more than idle curiosity, for we cannot otherwise assess their originality. But when a great poet stands apparently without roots in the literary tradition of his country, the urge to ascertain the influences which moulded him becomes unusually intense. So must we explain the bias of Bécquer studies ever since the first publication of the collected Rimas in 1871. For some sixty years the debate centered almost exclusively round the question of Bécquer's debt to Heine. But other poets lurked in the background. Isolated contacts with Musset, Schiller, and Anastasius Grün were noted long ago. In 1931 the field was widened when W. S. Hendrix sought to prove that Byron, not Heine, exercised an appreciable influence on the Rimas, while in the last twenty years Spanish and Latin-American scholars have begun to investigate more thoroughly the Spanish element in his work.

All that I have to report on at this time is the meeting of the executive committee of the Federation, held in Paris on December 2. All the regular delegates of the nine member-associations were present, and all but one of the officers. Professor Bôckmann, the chairman of the local committee for the Heidelberg Congress, and M. Jean d'Ormesson, representing CIPSH, were also present by invitation.

The years 1856–1950 represent the life span of George Bernard Shaw, one of the most pungent, witty, and versatile geniuses to be absorbed into the mind of the thinking world. The years 1888–94 represent the six years which he devoted to the concentrated effort of writing music criticism, first for the Star (1888–89) and then for the World (1890–94). Yet, despite their value as important contributions to critical literature, and notwithstanding their worth as patently clear statements and applications of Shaw's theories of art and criticism, these works have received little more than routine treatment from even the best of Shavian scholars.

Emily Dickinson's poetic vocabulary has been variously described as being “a small, rigidly compartmented vocabulary of general and conventional groups of terms, plus a moderately capacious vocabulary of homely, acute, directly felt words from which the whole actualizing strength of her verse is drawn”; as being a “large vocabulary including many rare words and some of her own manufacture”; and as being “undeniably rich, subtle, and strikingly original.” Much of the discussion of her vocabulary has been based upon the impressions of individual commentators and not upon an objective survey of her vocabulary as a whole, but the appearance in 1951 of a concordance to the poems of the Amherst poet in print at that time and the recent publication of the definitive edition of her poems that includes all of the known Dickinson material have made possible a detailed study of her entire vocabulary which furnishes a factual basis for conclusions as to her verbal habits. Such a study shows that the words on which a great deal of critical attention has been focused form only a small part of her total vocabulary and that her so-called favorite words are far from being her favorites on the basis of frequency of occurrence, findings that raise the question of whether the emphasis on those words is that of the poet or of the critics. Such a study also makes it possible to compare the Dickinson vocabulary with those of other poets and thus to determine in what ways she is unique in the words she uses and in what ways she conforms to patterns established by other poets. This discussion is based upon the results of such a study, and, in view of the comments that have been made on her vocabulary, it falls rather naturally into three parts: (1) the isolation and analysis of the more unusual words used by Dickinson, (2) the discussion of her “favorite” words, and (3) the comparison of her most frequently used words with those used most often by one hundred English poets from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. In general, it may be said that the findings show that Emily Dickinson's habits in the choice of words are similar to those of other poets and that her success or failure as a poet cannot be attributed to the use of an exotic or special vocabulary.

Although the importance which Bernard Shaw attached to the work of John Bunyan has often been remarked, no one has systematically explored the many passages concerning Bunyan scattered through Shaw's prose in order to determine what Bunyan meant to him and what influence Bunyan may be assumed to have had on his art. Aside from its intrinsic interest, such a study is of considerable importance because of the widespread acceptance, especially by hostile biographers and critics, of G. K. Chesterton's idea that Shaw was in a quite unmetaphorical sense a puritan. A study of Shaw's responses to the puritan Bunyan suggests that the famous Shavian “puritanism” was merely one of the many masks which G.B.S. held between himself and a world which he meant to irritate, entertain and instruct.

Bernard Shaw's Shakespeare criticism is generally presented by his critics as something to be ashamed of, often as an expression of his ignorance or perversity. Even to critics who find Shaw generally admirable, his attack upon Shakespeare is solecistic and blindspotted, and is either wholly condemned or halfheartedly defended. Hesketh Pearson dismisses the whole matter, contending that Shaw wrongly assumes that Shakespeare's characters speak for Shakespeare. Thus, the pessimism that Shaw finds pervasive in Shakespeare is explained by Pearson as a picture of reality by an objective artist. Archibald Henderson believes that Shaw's Shakespeare criticism is either anachronistic thinking or an act of vengeance on the British critics who viciously attacked Ibsen. James Gibbons Huneker apologizes for Shaw's criticisms of Shakespeare, justifying them on the ground that Shakespeare was not hurt by them. None of these critics meets Shaw's criticisms head-on, and their reactions have little to recommend them above Henry Arthur Jones's angry denunciation of Shaw as a desecrator of graves and a traitor to England.

The Jesuits never forgave Joyce for refusing to enter their Society, and he never forgave them for inviting him. The influence of this quarrel on his career is well known, and the effects of his Jesuit training on his work are often remarked in a general way. It remains, however, to specify the effects; for only when they are specified can we see clearly just what he rebelled against and why his rebellion took the forms it did. Joyce's books are in fact full of echoes from those of Saint Ignatius Loyola; we might begin by identifying some of them and assessing their significance.

At a meeting of the Commission on Trends held at Atlantic City in the winter of 1950, its members agreed, according to the report of Dean Thomas Clark Pollock, then its chairman, that the commission's “function was not operational, i.e., conducting educational investigations, but what we may for want of a better term call philosophical, i.e., the discussion of educational trends or conditions affecting areas represented in the Modern Language Association of America, and the preparation of reports or brief statements presenting its views on these trends or conditions.” During the period of Dean Pollock's chairmanship no statement on educational trends was issued, since other business proved more pressing; but at a meeting held at MLA headquarters on 21 and 22 April 1952, members of the Commission agreed to discharge their obligation by compiling jointly a report on developments and issues in the academic world which could be presented at the association's winter meeting. To this document, for which the chairman must acknowledge editorial responsibility, contributions were made by Dean John S. Diekhoff, Professors John H. Fisher, Helena M. Gamer, Kathrine Roller, Gordon N. Ray, and Francis M. Rogers. The materials surveyed were extensive—books, educational journals, bulletins, reports, college catalogs and announcements, newspapers, magazines; and in addition to their wide-ranging reviews, the contributors undertook a few special inquiries. They do not, however, in publishing their findings, make any pretension to scientific thoroughness, to close statistical accuracy, or to complete disinterestedness. The scanning and digesting of the literature currently available on the subject of American education is a very large task; the selection and appraisal of what is important must depend to a considerable degree upon the judgment and experience of the collaborators. Published accounts of projected innovations, or of educational processes, do not always reveal the genuine objectives, the actual character, of the activities described, or the kind of implementation achieved; indeed an adequate knowledge of these matters cannot often be gained by any means short of direct observation and inquiry. Such opportunities were not often open to members of the commission, who have had to record, along with the facts they have collected, some impressions and educated guesses. Since, however, the commission includes in its membership deans, department chairmen, a former officer of MLA who spent many years at headquarters, and graduate teachers of long experience—all persons who have had considerable practice in gauging the state of education in several parts of the country, and all persons responsible for predicting future developments—this composite view may prove useful. The collaborators have occupied themselves chiefly with the trends apparent in higher education in the United States, and in particular with those affecting the humanities.

One of the most significant aspects of the intellectual climate of the 1890's in France is undoubtedly the rapid spreading of Nietzsche's thought. Numerous fragmentary translations from his work were published in the literary reviews of the period, such as l'Ermitage, the Revue Blanche, le Banquet, and above all the Mercure de France. Articles on this philosopher were legion, and translations of complete Nietzschean works also began to appear with increasing frequency. The whole process has been described in detail by Geneviève Bianquis in her well-known study of Nietzsche's influence on French thought. By 1895 Nietzscheanism, though still in a rather vague form, was an essential part of the general intellectual atmosphere, and by the end of the decade we can speak of a true Nietzsche vogue.

In the last weeks of World War II when the battle front swayed to and fro around Vienna, Ida Orloff died practically forgotten, in the nearby hamlet of Tullnerbach, in the fifty-seventh year of her life. Few among the villagers knew her as a once-famous star of the foremost theaters in Berlin and Vienna. In the confusion of those climactic days of the war when all newspapers had suspended publication, no notice was taken of her death and her biography has remained unwritten. Inasmuch as Gerhart Hauptmann patterned the heroines of a number of his works after the youthful actress, a brief documented account of her most unconventional life and of her relations with the great Silesian poet may be of some interest to students of the German theater of the first half of the twentieth century.