The First World War had been over for two years. In the League of Nations atmosphere following its close, world scholarship had begun to mobilize. In 1918 the Modern Humanities Research Association had been founded. In 1919 the International Research Council, the International Astronomical Union, the International Chemistry Union, and the International Union of Academies had all been organized, and similar bodies were being founded each succeeding year. In these international bodies, American scholars were ill at ease. The war had convinced Great Britain and Europe of the material achievements of the United States, but American scholars, many of them trained abroad, felt keenly that their nation did not stand so high in the fields of international scholarship. One of the first actions of the MHRA had been to send representatives across the Atlantic to meet with MLA members, out of which discussion grew the MLA annual bibliography (1921), intended to display American literary and linguistic scholarship to European scholars. The American Council of Learned Societies, founded in 1919 to make possible American participation in the International Union of Academies, had immediately addressed itself to fostering American scholarly projects that would earn respect abroad.

Warren's novel in verse, Brother to Dragons, is most notable in its philosophy and psychology and summarizes vividly his continuing metaphysical and ethical themes. Aware in his moralist's zeal “that poetry is more than fantasy and is committed to the obligation of trying to say something about the human condition,” Warren is in this work more than ever haunted by an anguished sense of the disparity in man between recurrent beatific vision and the ubiquitous evil which blights it. Accounting for the force of the book are Warren's realization of character, his flair for the arresting image and apt phrase, his evocation of situation and atmosphere, and his instinct for the telling structural contrast. Indispensable as are these aspects of literary talent to the precise rendition of value through form, they are all subordinate to Warren's tense brooding over human motivation and human destiny.

The title of these remarks would imply a “swan song,” which they are, but perhaps the content should have some such title as “Three Good Men in the Same Boat.”

The Modern Language Association is now seventy-one years old. During approximately one-half of those years—since 1920, to be exact—we have been exceedingly fortunate in having in succession three scholarly executives who have given the major portion of their waking hours to their work as Secretary and Editor: Carleton Brown (1920–34), Percy Long (1935–47), and William R. Parker, who since October 1947 has been Secretary and since 1948 Editor of PMLA.

Absalom! Absalom! is a unique fictional experiment—unique in relation to Faulkner's other novels and to modern fiction generally. Indeed, it is not too much to claim that in point of technique it constitutes the last radical innovation in fictional method since Joyce. A “difficult” work, its difficulties do not inhere in verbal subtleties or in excessive refinement of perception, but in the strain imposed upon attention and sensibility in comprehending its monumental design.

André Suarès, following in the tradition of the great French moralists of the past, is an acute and profound contemporary observer of the universe and of himself. Yet, except for an occasional passing remark by a critic identifying him as a moralist, he is generally not given such recognition, a failure partly due, no doubt, to the fact that his observations and intellectual reflections are not conveniently and systematically placed at the disposal of his reader. Instead of offering in one or two handy volumes the fruits of his survey of the universe, as do such moralistic ancestors as Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Vauvenargues, Suarès keeps adding to or amplifying his repertoire of observations from volume to volume. Everywhere, even in his studies or portraits, whether they be of Baudelaire or Pascal, Ibsen or Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or Goethe, he intersperses his reflections on life and human behavior. Nor are these observations always put in an epigrammatic or sententious form. Despite discouragement, however, the reader upon closer study soon sees that Suarès has the gift and capacity for extracting even from the most insignificant matter “tout le suc humain.” This he is able to do because he probes deeply into human behavior and because in every one of man's relationships he glimpses the stream of life.

Few poems have ever been priced as high as William Carlos Williams' Paterson, if one may borrow the central metaphor of Book III in order to suggest the enormous cost in concentration which must be met before any adequate evaluation can be made. If this work were built around a consistently presented hero—the Paterson of the title—that cost might not be so prohibitive as many readers will find it; but when Williams asserts in the introduction to Book III (“The Library”) that Paterson is not only the hero but also the heroine, not only a city but also cliffs and waterfall, one cries out for a critic to assist him, as the sea-god did Peleus, in conquering the metamorphic problem. Before judging the total merit of Paterson, however, one must weather a preliminary season of understanding, of looking hard and often at aim and structure—in brief, of giving the poem the creative reading that such an undertaking deserves. The poet, realizing the difficulty of meeting this high cost, has given some measure of help in the headnote to the entire poem, and also in the list of topics which he places immediately after the words Book One, as if in apposition; the latter consists of eighteen phrases separated by semicolons, each phrase a possible definition of Paterson. The last of these phrases, and one which may well supply a key-quotation for this essay, is “a dispersal and a metamorphosis.”

The most significant studies to date of Saint-John Perse approach his work “extensively,” keeping the poet's total output in the foreground. Commentary on individual poems is not entirely lacking, especially on Anabase and Vents, but nothing approaching exhaustive textual analysis of any one poem has yet been attempted. The present study has been undertaken in the belief that an intensive approach to a small segment of Perse's work may supplement and give sharper relief to the insights of more general studies and perhaps lead some readers more directly to the actual text of one of the unquestioned major poets of our time.

This is my third annual report as Director of the FL Program. It gives me great pleasure to begin by quoting a resolution passed by the M LA Council at a special meeting held last month: “The Executive Council declares the essential elements of the current Foreign Language Program to be a permanent concern of the Modern Language Association, eventually to be included in the annual budget.” This policy statement looks forward to October 1958, when present foundation support for the Program expires. As most of you know, the Rockefeller Foundation has recently made us a supplementary grant of $115,000, to be spent in the period 1955–58. Expressions of confidence totalling nearly a quarter of a million dollars inspire (to put it mildly) mixed emotions. Not for another quarter of a million would I admit that we are undeserving; but I freely concede that this profession has scarcely begun to spend its own human resources for giving language study a vital role in American education and life.

A prevalent assumption about Cummings' poetry has been that it lacks a history—that it shows no growth, as if a man had been treading water for thirty years. This is a serious thing to say about a body of work which not only has become legendary in its time, but can also boast a respectable number of poems widely praised as first-rate. Early in Cummings' career it was brought home to many of his readers that he would use, to the borders of extravagance if he so liked, a profusion of technical devices sometimes difficult, sometimes eccentric, sometimes of no apparent usefulness at all. It was also made clear that he would take attitudes which, whether defensible or not, were not to be confined within the limits of what the world regards as either rational or decorous. One risk taken by any artist when he chooses at the beginning of his creative life to be perceptibly “different” from his traditions, is that, whether he actually adheres to it or not, he will ever after be read by the light of his divergence. And Cummings has not escaped this fate. He has too often been read as if he had stopped growing in the mid-1920's, and had turned into that most depressing of all literary freaks, the artist who parodies himself. The main end of this essay will be to demonstrate the injustice and the falsity of such a view.

Recent teaching duties have obliged me to reread the bulk of Unamuno's published writings. In this rereading I have been struck by three or four clusters of images that recur with what seems like obsessive frequency. The purpose of this essay is to exhibit these images and to attempt to discover what function they fulfill in Unamuno's writing.

In his prologue to the first Argentine edition of Eduardo Barrios' novel Un perdido, Manuel Gálvez sets forth a number of germinal ideas. One of these is that Lucho Bernales, the perdido of Barrios' fictional creation, is a “brother” to Gálvez' own Carlos Riga of El mal metafísico; and furthermore he proposes certain literary sources for both characters. It is the present purpose to examine these two suggestions, testing their adequacy, then passing on to inquire whether a pattern of thought may not be detected and whether other important novels may not be related to the questions thus raised.

Most of George Gissing's social novels bear the mark of an allegiance divided between social reform and art. Each begins by addressing itself to some problem of nineteenth-century civilization, such as poverty, Mammonism, socialism, rack-renting, educational reform, or the position of women, depicting evil conditions with powerful social realism. As the novel proceeds, however, social questions are gradually relegated to the background, and the story becomes a steady and, at best, inevitable unfolding of events whose course is determined in the final analysis by the characters of the people involved in it. There may be frequent reversions to “problems” and these may have some effect on the action, but a dénouement that fails to correspond with the social theme, or even contradicts it, makes it apparent that the novel of plot and character has usurped the place of the novel of protest. This inconsistency may well be one of the reasons why such social novels as Workers in the Dawn (1880), The Unclassed (1884), Demos (1886), Thyrza (1887), and The Nether World (1889) failed to win Gissing any but the smallest public, although they were recognized as faithful and moving portrayals of conditions that demanded reform. One reviewer of The Nether World pointed clearly to the ambiguity characteristic of Gissing's work by saying: “It is difficult to discover whether he hoped to add to that sort of fiction which has at times been more successful than Blue-books or societies in calling attention to evils crying for remedy or whether … the author chose his subject in something like an artistic spirit… His work does not show the energy either of an artist or of an enthusiast …”