The three sonnets that Rilke published in his Neue Gedichle (1907–08) under the collective title “Das Portal” were written between 8 and 11 July 1906, during the period of intense productivity following the break with Rodin (May 1906). Ever since it has become fashionable to ignore Rilke's Neue Gedichte as “intellektuell aufgezwungen,” these poems have been overlooked by many scholars and critics; even the most recent and staunchest champion of the Neue Gedichte, Hans Berendt, has failed to explore various aspects of these sonnets that would serve to relate them more closely to Rilke's earlier and later work. The reasons for this neglect are obvious. The three sonnets represent a perfect example of the “Dinggedicht” of this period, being apparently nothing more than the poetic depiction of a particular portal of a certain cathedral in France; such an objective attempt to grasp and express the essence of a foreign “thing” is, by common consent, necessarily alien to the singularly subjective flow of the poet's own thoughts and emotions. Furthermore, this new conception of poetry arose under the influence of the sculptor Rodin, whom Rilke was striving to emulate in his efforts always to capture the essential nature of the model and the “modelé” to the exclusion of subjective impressions. Since Rilke learned much about cathedrals under the tutelage of Rodin, his poems on architectural subjects are even more highly suspect of being “intellektuell aufgezwungen” than, say, poems dealing with gazelles or carrousels. Yet in many of the Neue Gedichte, as has been demonstrated, there is more to be found than sheer poetic virtuosity, and undeniable thematic connections with the entire body of Rilke's poetic creation have been uncovered. A closer examination of the “Portal” sonnets reveals that even here certain characteristic themes may be found.

The extensive commentaries on Ibsen as a writer of tragedy are varied arid, as one might suspect, even contradictory. S. H. Butcher, for example, found Ibsen deficient as a tragic dramatist on nearly all counts. My primary purpose in this essay will be to present Ibsen's concept of tragedy through an analysis of Brand (1866), Ghosts (1881), Rosmersholm (1886), and The Master Builder (1892), with passing attention to Emperor and Galilean (1873), while my secondary purpose will be to determine how successful he was as a writer of tragedy.

Verlaine may be one of the least intellectual of French poets, yet his “Art poétique” finds its way regularly into anthologies of French literature as the perfect symbolist counterpart of Gautier's “L'art,” the manifesto Of the Parnassians. “De la musique avant toute chose” is the advertised motto of the symbolist school of the eighties and nineties, just as the marmorean ideal was of the Parnassians of the sixties and seventies, indeed of Verlaine himself in the Poèmes saturniens (“Est-elle en marbre ou non, la Vénus de Milo?”). As in the case of any such well-worn document, there are two points of view from which it may be studied: (1) the intent of the creator of the document and (2) the overlay of interpretation which has developed around it. Let us attempt to render service to Verlaine by trying to determine his own meaning, through close examination of this and other works of the poet, as distinct from the meaning which his followers and associates read into this little “chanson.”

Some fifteen months have passed since I last reported directly to you on the progress of the Foreign Language Program at our unseasonable September meeting in Wisconsin. At that time I had been Director of the FL Program just one month, after five years as a staff member. Today I report again, although extraordinary circumstances have persuaded me to vacate the directorship, temporarily at least. I am called upon for an evaluation of the FL Program from its inception in 1952 to the present. Lest you think a post-mortem is implied, I hasten to state emphatically that the FL Program is a continuing and organic function of the MLA, indeed, of the entire profession of teachers of modern foreign languages, and, I venture to add, of all elements in American society with an interest in strengthening education.

The main conclusion I draw from my study of the American high school can be summed up very quickly. Based upon personal visits to fifty-five high schools from coast to coast and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, this conclusion is that no radical change in the basic pattern of American secondary education is needed in order to make our high school as satisfactory as the best I have seen.