It has been made increasingly evident by critics in recent years that the drowning of Edward King was the occasion, rather than the subject, of Lycidas. Milton's concern was generally with the life, death, and resurrection of the dedicated poet, and specifically with his own situation at the time. From this premise it follows that there are no digressions in the poem and that the form and traditions of pastoral elegy are entirely appropriate to its intentions.

Shelley's Prometheus Unbound in many ways might be considered the most significant and characteristic of his works. Yet in this drama the poet himself has pointed out his indebtedness to the Prometheus Bound of Æschylus. Able scholars, in turn, have examined the relationship between the English and the Greek plays. Over half a century ago Vera D. Scudder published her study, and in 1908 Richard Ackermann brought out his critical commentary. Among others, W. J. Alexander and A. M. D. Hughes, in editing their selections from the poems of Shelley, noted the parallels between his work and that of Æschylus. In more recent times, Carl Grabo has gone beyond the study of Greek-English parallels, and Newman Ivey White in the notable twenty-second chapter of his Shelley has enriched our understanding of Prometheus Unbound. Still one may hope by concentrating on the problem to give fuller meaning to the action of the mind of Æschylus upon that of Shelley as together they face tyranny and pain.

Tillyard's interpretation of Lycidas as a tragic conflict between man's ego and his sense of finitude, resolved through a sublimation of the individual's fears and hopes in the aspirations of his group, has gained wide acceptance. Yet Tillyard, in focusing attention on the theme and its relationship to biographical data, has tended to minimize the pastoral and occasional aspects of the poem. On the other hand, the traditional over-emphasis on these aspects has long resulted in an evaluation of Lycidas as largely an allegory of college life and friendship or as a a supremely skillful exercise in a now archaic genre. Neither approach has included more than cursory consideration of Milton's imagery. This essay proposes that our understanding of Lycidas may be enriched by combining an historical and æsthetic point of view in a study of the relationship of the imagery of the poem to its other constituents. The essay will be particularly concerned with testing the hypothesis that the allusion to Orpheus in lines 56–63 is an important functional image through which Milton defined and developed his theme.

The verse-epistle comprising all but a few sentences of the letter which Keats wrote to John Hamilton Reynolds on March 25, 1818, is a mixture of half-morbid jocularity and half-cynical seriousness. In lines 67–85 Keats tries to explain his strange mood by declaring that he feels the obligation to “philosophize” in poetry, does not yet “dare” to do so, fears that he never will be able to do so, and does not really wish to do so because “It spoils the singing of the Nightingale.” This conflict between “sensation” and “thought” is an old story to students of Keats. It has never been sufficiently emphasized, however, that in the concluding verse-paragraph what really “spoils the singing of the Nightingale” turns out to be not moral philosophy, but natural philosophy of so pessimistic a kind that it forbids any hope of harmonizing the sensuous love of beauty with a helpfully benevolistic view of the universe.

Everyone has a different explanation for James Joyce. Thornton Wilder says he is a man divided between a violent love and a violent hate, “a love that cannot integrate its hate” and “a hate that cannot integrate its love”, a love and a hate for the land and the people he left but was unable ever to forget. Harry Levin, insofar as he attempts at all to explain, places great emphasis on Joyce's youthful theory of the development of the arts as a progress from the lyric, through the epic, to the dramatic. Barry Bymo agrees with the importance of this literary theory and suggests that Joyce's problem was the incompatibility between his artistic program and his own capabilities. Gorman, offering us his idol, does not explain Joyce at all except in terms of his high integrity, superb intellect, and remarkable fortitude—an explanation based for the most part on Joyce's own declarations to these effects. And Gogarty, antipathetic, seemingly resentful, attributes Joyce's development to the inherent arrogance which led him to reject his religion but never released him from fears of the consequences of this rejection. Gogarty therefore singles out as the crucial trauma from which Joyce never recovered and toward which he never ceased to react, the sermon on Damnation, Hell, and Eternity which he heard at Belvedere College when he was eleven years old.

The unfortunate pronouncements of Menéndez y Pelayo have condemned the poetry of the early Spanish cancioneros to undeserved neglect. A revision is in order, for the subject has importance for both Spanish and comparative literature. This poetry is not a mere jumble of far-fetched superficialities. Progressively purged of license and adapted to Christian courtship and marriage, it yet preserves in fairly definite shape the traditional pattern of courtly love. It is necessary to apply to Spanish cancionero poetry concepts that have been worked out for other European literatures.

The New Variorum Coriolanus offers ample evidence that criticism of this play has spent its force upon two sources of conflict: the relationship between plebs and patricians and the relationship between Coriolanus and his mother. These approaches have led to interesting speculation as to Shakespeare's own point of view. But the fact remains to be reckoned with that the two disastrous relationships which most have excited critics are also exciting in North's Plutarch and that Shakespeare's most important departures from his source are in another direction. In this paper I hope to show that Shakespeare drew principally upon the military situation of his own era and country in reshaping the Plutarchan story. In this reshaping, Coriolanus emerges as a soldier whose life comprises two significantly related phases: the soldier at war and the soldier in civil life. The Roman general's difficulty in adjusting himself to a non-military career is of central importance because Shakespeare gave this problem a greater prominence and more clearly defined statement than did Plutarch. Nevertheless, Coriolanus' rôle in warfare is, in Shakespeare's design, basic to an understanding of his rôle in peace. What is more, the complexity of the former rôle has been underestimated by critics, most of whom esteem him an excellent warrior.

On a convenu, par un noble euphémisme, d'appeler la parole versifiée “le langage des dieux.” Mais il n'y a guère que les poètes qui prennent parfois cette expression usée au sérieux. Pour bien ces gens elle reste un simple cliché: l'expérience qu'elle recouvre est absente, nul rapport ne s'établit entre la source invisible du monde et les formes créées de l'apparence. Mais le poète est conscient au plus haut point des relations qui unissent la vie spirituelle au langage chargé de la transposer dans l'univers sensible. Comme l'a chanté Rilke dans les Sonnets à Orphée:

Est-il bien d'ici? Non, des deux
royaumes surgit sa vaste nature.
Plus savamment pliera les ramures des saules
qui des saules apprit à sonder les racines.

From the number of articles on Dante and the frequency of American printings of the Divine Comedy in translation, it appears that even before 1850 Dante had a larger American public than might be supposed. At the mid-century Emerson remarked in his comments on Margaret Fuller's interest in Dante: “An edition of Cary's translation, reprinted in Boston, many years ago, was rapidly sold; and, for the last twenty years, all studious youths and maidens have been reading the Inferno.” Melville was one of these studious readers. He purchased a copy of Cary in 1848, and in works after this date made frequent reference to “that infernalest of infernos, The Inferno”, especially in Pierre. The hero of the novel is a devoted reader of Dante—“you always loved Dante”, says Millthorpe to Pierre (p. 441)—and about one half of it, Books ii to ix, pivots on references to the Inferno, which in a powerfully symbolical manner underscore the pervasive tragic gloom and develop on an emotive level the hero's reactions to the existence of evil. Relying on some knowledge of the Inferno on the reader's part, Melville adopts the technique of literary allusion and quotation functioning in place of formal exposition, the literary reference itself becoming contextually an expository symbol of the hero's internal states and of the ubiquity and universality of evil. Melville adopts this technique in other works, but never so extensively as in Pierre, nor so effectively at crucial moments in the development of character and theme.