A tradition of oral poetry (izibongo) still exists among the Xhosa-speaking tribes of South Africa, but as yet few analytical studies based on fieldwork have been published. The Xhosa tradition differs in some respects from the Serbo-Croatian tradition as defined by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, though there are elements common to both traditions. Parry and Lord concentrated attention on the guslar, an improvising epic poet, but the Xhosa tribal poet (imbongi) should be seen in the context of all poetic activities in his community. The tradition of Xhosa izibongo is complex, consisting of at least four distinct activities: many Xhosa tribesmen have the ability to compose poetry on the inspiration of the moment; most Xhosas commit to memory traditional poems or poems of their own composition; the imbongi, a figure of considerable importance and influence in traditional society, generally composes his refined poetry in performance; and some literate Xhosas commit their poetry to writing. Each of these four kinds of poetic production is significantly different from the others, but each also influences the others.

In the Renaissance, religious and political confrontations generated an intensified awareness of the self which marks a decisive phase in the evolution of human personality, whose study may be entitled Historical Psychology. Alienation from religious and political strife turned the interests of Petrarch and Montaigne toward their own minds, Marot's persecution for heresy developed his self-awareness in L'Enfer, followed by Ronsard's self-defensive autobiography in his Reply to Insults. Such models prefigure Milton's authorial intrusions of Paradise Lost. Shakespeare illustrates the creative impact of religious controversy by enriching the hints of Lollardry in Falstaff with a wide variety of Puritan affectations in the Elizabethan period. The Protestant attacks on Machiavelli also help in developing the character of Richard III and similar introverted creations, as T. S. Eliot notes. By the time of Marvell, personality is considered essentially artificial and willed—an inheritance from which Swift, the Romantics, and many modern authors have profited. Historical Psychology is thus a necessary tool if we are to handle the development of literary tradition.

One of Shakespeare's first and most formative intellectual legacies, with major influence on his shaping of sources in the historical tetralogies, was Elizabethan thought on the relationship of God, Fortune, and war. For the Henry vi plays, the legacy offered a thematically appropriate concept of Fortune, with humanly meaningless skirmishes and futile stratagems, pointing nevertheless toward the ultimate control of God over Fortune. For Richard iii Shakespeare chose a divinely governed war, with Richmond as a passive instrument having little character. The second tetralogy employs the most dramatically advantageous stage of the legacy: a transitional, confused period when necessity for human responsibility in war becomes first, and somewhat ambiguously, recognized (Richard iii) and then disturbingly, though covertly, prominent and Machiavellian (Henry iv and Henry v). The experience in these formative plays of trying to resolve the conflicting demands of supernatural control and human resourcefulness helped prepare Shakespeare for tragic resolutions deeper than those of military victory or defeat.

Charges by Jeremy Collier and others in the controversy generated by A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage have been widely accepted while the replies by Congreve, Vanbrugh, and many other stage defenders have been generally neglected or depreciated. The critical tenets of Collier's opponents are examined in the framework of four postulates Congreve presents in his own defense. Along with others sharing his views, Congreve the “Aristotelian” argues that the drama must represent vice and folly in strongly mimetic terms in order to shame offenders and divert and warn others, and also that the virtue portrayed on stage must be uncloistered and subjected to trials and temptations of a most pressing and realistic nature. Collier the “Platonist,” on the other hand, is shown to believe that such realistic examples are corruptive rather than corrective, and that therefore vice and folly must be represented only “in Generals.”

A recent defense of Paul et Virginie argues that the status of this work as a masterpiece can be appreciated if we concentrate on its poetic qualities and disregard its often contradictory didacticism. Yet this didacticism can be seen to be integrated into the work's “poetry” if we note that it functions on three levels. The first level is characterized by the demonstration of the irresistible conditioning effect of civilization, even in remote colonies. The second level is informed by the basic pessimism regarding life on earth that pervades the text. Subtending these is a solid mythical foundation which combines what Denis de Rougemont calls the “Tristan myth” with what Joseph Campbell calls the “monomyth of the hero.” The form, style, and message are harmoniously unified in the story itself, but the implications of the work's narrative frame and its survival as literature tend to belie its celebration of death.

In Vanity Fair Thackeray moves beyond the inherited traditions of moral and social satire as his vision of society darkens and as he realizes the anarchic potentials of laughter and satire. Examining not the particular ills of a certain society, but the diseased structures inherent in civilization itself, Thackeray creates a world defined by madness and emptiness; in it satire holds little sway. In trying to locate alternatives to or a way out of an apparently inexorable pattern of death and destruction, Thackeray looks, through the image of childhood, toward a pastoral vision, one that assumes various and yet similar configurations for those characters who travel into this visionary landscape. As Charlotte Brontë intuited, Thackeray's novel embodies both the impulses of the moral and social satirist and those of the visionary or prophet. It is the final irreconcilability of these double impulses that accounts for much of the power and haunting quality of Vanity Fair.

Sometime around 1608, during his years of idleness at Mitcham, John Donne was overwhelmed with a sense of his own vanity in being cut off from “the body of the world.” Since he had been reduced to this state by excessive love of a woman (in his marriage to Ann More) and of knowledge (in his “hydroptic, immoderate desire of human learning”), Donne quite naturally turned to Solomon and the Book of Ecclesiastes for an understanding of his own predicament. The influence endured. The effects of Ecclesiastes are most evident in Donne's Anniversaries but can also be traced through virtually the entire range of his work.

The structure of Dante's Paradiso is a mediating sign of “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Each time Dante the pilgrim moves to a higher sphere, his visionary power grows, passing through successive formulations of God's love. The growing beauty of Beatrice's smile measures his advance, and at several points (Par. x, xxiii, and xxviii) her words or her reflecting eyes explicate the semantic function of what Dante sees, thus projecting him one step closer to the Beatific Vision, to which all the signs refer. Finally, the pilgrim transcends Beatrice, just when her beauty transcends the poet's power to render it. In the last canti the pilgrim confronts a reality transforming itself in direct response to his visionary power, while the poet and we find vestiges of that reality in the transformations of his language through metaphor. This final dialectic of vision and language suggests themes of modernist poetry.

There are two kinds of risk in the act of reading: that the reader will not understand what the author wants him to and that the emotional or moral risk involved in such understanding will be so great that the reader may reject it. Either kind of risk threatens the community between author and reader by jeopardizing the confidence the reader has in his own competence as reader and in the author's purposefulness. Failures of communication or too great resistance to the experience offered by a piece of literature prevent active, perceptive, and morally receptive involvement. Redundancy assures that the reader will understand, or that he will receive the message accurately and draw the intended conclusions; and it reassures him so that he will be able to tolerate the lessons he learns.