Grendel's feud against Hrothgar and his Danes has been requited not only by the hand of Beowulf but by the scholarly shafts which have nailed the monster to his watery lair. Outside of his natural habitat, however, Grendel is still a problem in his nocturnal visits to the royal hall of Heorot.

It is doubtful whether there is any modern literature, even that of Spain or of Russia, to which the many questions concerning religion are so central as they are in France. The oft-quoted saying of Nietzsche, in The Dawn of Day, is not a paradoxical assertion put forward by a German admirer of French culture: “It cannot be denied that the French have been the most Christian nation in the world, not because the devotion of masses in France has been greater than elsewhere, but because those Christian ideals which are most difficult to realize have become incarnated there, instead of merely remaining fancies, intentions or imperfect beginnings.” Nietzsche adduced as examples not only Pascal or Fénelon, and French Protestants, but free thinkers as well, and he praised the latter “because they had to fight against truly great men and not, like the free thinkers of other nations, merely against dogmas and sublime abortions.” A student of French literature who had no familiarity with the religious background and traditions, no interest in the many controversies which have opposed one sect of Catholics to another, Catholics to Protestants, believers to unbelievers, clericals to anti-clericals, would be crippled at every stage.

A recent survey estimates that there are. today in the six New England states alone well over a million persons of French-Canadian descent, the overwhelming majority of whom understand and speak French natively. At a time when increased and improved knowledge of modern foreign languages is patently needed, this vast pool of native speakers and potential teachers of French constitutes an increasingly valuable linguistic resource. The Franco-American Institute held at Bowdoin College in the summer of 1961 under the terms of the National Defense Education Act sought to exploit more fully in the national interest this New England French resource. The Institute marked the first time in history that an ethnic group was accorded federal support in its struggle to preserve its linguistic heritage—a sharp divergence from official efforts at intensive Americanization following World War I. It was also the first concerted effort made in this country by language teachers of any nationality to come to grips in a realistic way with the problem of teaching the standard form of a language to a group of persons whose second language is non-standard. The central problem faced by the Institute was the unquestioned right of French-Canadian speech to be recognized as a respectable means of communication. All due respect was accorded to this linguistically-sound fact, but the Institute nevertheless took the position that the national interest demands the teaching of standard French in all U. S. schools today.

This essay aims to define certain fundamental differences between two types of rhythmic patterning indigenous to English verse, and to suggest that full recognition of these differences can do much to clear up standard confusions in our prosodic terminology. A recent essay by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley went part way toward performing such a service by reinforcing a traditional distinction between non-syllable-counting “native” or “strong-stress” meter, patterned entirely on the accentual principle, and “syllable-stress” meters, patterned on the principle of an “interplay” of native accentual rhythms with syllable-counting techniques inherited originally from Romance-language prosody.1 It is my contention, however, that, valid as this distinction is, there is a more important one which is blurred by the tendency to emphasize regularization of the number of syllables in the verse line as the primary, if not the sole, factor differentiating the two chief metrical modes. I hope to show that, of the four so-called “syllable-stress” meters in English—iambic, trochaic, anapestic, and dactylic—only the iambic has developed in a direction radically different from the native accentual tradition; that the other three, as characteristically used in English poetry, are simply variants of the strong-stress mode; and that the very term “syllable-stress” is misleading because syllable-counting techniques may occur in strong-stress verse and the stress-factor alone does not account for all rhythmic discriminations in iambic verse. The distinction with which this essay is concerned—between the entire iambic tradition and all English verse written in strong-stress meter, whether syllable-counting or not—is, I believe, the most basic one in English prosody, necessary not only in performing formal scansions but also in understanding and appreciating significant contrasts between two very different ways of hearing and composing a poetic line.

Der vater der Geschichtsschreibung, Herodot, berichtet uns in den Historien: Die Hellenen haben die Namen der Götter von den Pelasgern übernommen; woher aber jeder stammt und ob sie alle von Ewigkeit waren und von welcher Gestalt sie sind, das hat man sozusagen bis gestern nicht gewußt.1 Hesiod und Homer sind es, die den Hellenen ihr Göttergeschlecht geschaffen, den Göttern ihre Beinamen gegeben, Ehren und Künste unter sie verteilt und ihre Gestalten bezeichnet haben.2

These WORDS of Li Ch'ing-chao, regarded by many as the greatest woman poet in Chinese history, were written shortly after the death of her husband, who had been her devoted companion and faithful comrade in letters. His death was the strongest influence in her life, bringing to her poems a depth of feeling that, like a colorless blue in the flame of her genius, gave them brilliance and intensity. To be sure, Li Ch'ing-chao had earned a position in Chinese poetry long before her husband's death, largely because of her rare sensitivity to the aesthetic and poetic quality of the world in which she lived. While her poetry reflected a limited world of nature and of man, she more than compensated for this apparent lack with the depth of her imaginative penetration.

Although the thinkers of the Middle Ages il did not develop any theories about the function of the artist which can be compared with those of Plato or the Romantics, they had definite views on art and its relation to society. Art in its broadest sense had for them an ethical and social function which inevitably became part of the grand design of the universe. None of the great writers of romance is without consciousness of this function. In the creation of the Arthurian romance in particular they were fully aware of their responsibilities, but they interpreted them in differing ways. It seems to me that Gottfried von Strassburg realizes most fully the intellectual aspects of his responsibility and takes most note of the esthetic theories which justified the arts, and in particular music, as beneficial for Christian men and women and as leading towards that harmony of the spirit with the eternal which was regarded as the highest good.

We all know that linguist has lately become a magic word. Men who used to be merely English or Spanish professors find that when they are called by this term they are welcomed almost as equals by ecologists and astrophysicists; and scientifically trained administrators on public platforms, anxious to show the breadth of their interests but not feeling quite up to coming out in favor of poetry, are happy to be able to bow in the direction of departments that once seemed hopeless. For the first time within living memory there is even a good deal of money and patronage available for language students—as long as they are labeled linguists.

In the last twenty years or so the rehabilitation of Criseyde has proceeded triumphantly until she seems nearly reinstated as the figure she was before her denigration at the hands of Henryson and the Elizabethans. The contrast, for example, between the treatments given her by A. S. Cook in the early years of the century and by her most recent appraisor, John Bayley, shows how far this reinstatement has gone. But despite the apparent victory, here and there remain strong points, untaken pockets of resistance left behind by the victorious forces in their onward sweep, where the views of the old orthodoxy still prevail and from which a counterattack could be mounted. The most important of these is, I believe, the still prevailing misconception of the central episode leading to Criseyde's surrender. Baldly stated, the orthodox belief is this: that Criseyde went to Pandarus' house expecting to surrender herself then and there to Troilus. The process of arriving at this belief is usually simple. Examining the episode at Deiphebus' house, the critic argues, first, that Criseyde knows surrender to be the ultimate outcome of her acceptance of Troilus as a lover; second, that she must understand surrender as the purpose of the meeting which Pandarus promises to arrange. Next, the critic notes that Criseyde did expect to find her lover at her uncle's house when Pandarus finally invited her for the evening; he then hurdles over some six hundred of the most minutely subtle lines Chaucer ever wrote and arrives at the surrender itself; and he clinches his belief by quoting his favorite and eagerly anticipated passage: