It is not Eve's reconciling gesture of “love” in Book x of Paradise Lost that leads Adam back to God. Instead, Adam is restored by a mysterious “literary” insight as he suddenly perceives his sentence as a promise. Adam's “opening” is the sacramental moment toward which the action of Paradise Lost is leading and reflects the Reformers' understanding that the first promise (protevangelium), like other promises in the Bible, constitutes an inner scripture that equalizes all ages. Thus, in the main, the Reformers appropriate Old Testament stories without resorting to typology, for they treat the patriarchs as the first Christians who embraced the word. They see the Old Testament narratives as a sacramental vessel through which the viva vox Christi can speak to the reader of any age as he identifies with the patriarch in the story.

Part of Goethe’s intention in Hermann und Dorothea is to awaken in the reader a disturbing sense of discrepancy between form and content. Systematic, statistically controlled analysis of the poem’s meter, along with a treatment of specific Homeric allusions in the text, leads to this conclusion, also supported by less rigorous but no less valid interpretive arguments. This discrepancy, moreover, is left unresolved, creating a feeling of pervasive irony, but not in the sense of satire or mockery. The reader is encouraged to adopt a superior critical perspective toward the bourgeois values in the poem, but, in that this perspective itself becomes an object of irony, he is also invited to affirm such values. Although this contradiction, like the tension between form and content, is never resolved, it can be understood as expressing an idea of the historical need for bourgeois stability, however banal, in the period depicted.

These are not the best of years for our Association, or, I suspect, for any professional association involved with higher education. The problems are, of course, financial, problems on which I hardly need elaborate since they are problems with which, in our colleges and universities as well as in our homes, we are all familiar. I do feel obliged to make a few comments on the Association's financial crisis before concluding this report, but, since this is the season to be jolly, I prefer to begin on a happier note by discussing recent developments that I think are of special importance to the Association.

Whether reflecting the social theme in a drama alive to contemporary issues, or reacting to the jaded taste of a theatrical clientele, or probing individually for the most effective delineation of man's tragic plight, the Jacobean dramatists explore a view of life more somber and pessimistic than their Elizabethan counterparts.

John Ford represents the culmination of this basic dramaturgical trend. In 'Tis Pity She's a Whore he creates central figures whose affection, if unrighteous, is also intensely sincere and whose aberrant conduct must be weighed against the treachery and hypocrisy of the society whose morality the lovers have rejected. The anagnorisis as well as the protagonist is doubled, and the spectator is left to choose between the wisdom of Annabella's Christian repentance and Giovanni's stoic insistence on the sanctity of private values. The result is a fundamentally pessimistic view of life in which man's challenge is the ambiguity of moral values constantly frustrating his search for a meaningful life.

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 relationship between the two worlds of As You Like It becomes a metaphor of love, defined by conspicuous narrative and theatrical artifice. The expository opening scenes have a storybook flatness which becomes a metaphor of a world that limits self-realization while the liberating sojourn in the forest, a festive world of disguise and imagination, parallels the spectators’ experience in the playhouse as a withdrawal from everyday life. The pattern of withdrawal and return also objectifies the psychological development of love: the courtship of Rosalind and Orlando progresses from impulsive love at first sight at court, through subjective and imaginative responses to desire in the forest, to fulfillment in marriage. The play concludes by placing subjective freedom, expressed metaphorically through theatrical artifice, in the larger setting of forces beyond the self, established metaphorically in narrative artifice.

Rabelais's two prologues are examined as défenses et illustrations of his theory of creativity, a theory largely influenced by the Platonic furor divinus, for in both chapters Rabelais describes the source of his genius as a state of madness. However, two kinds of madness confront each other in dynamic opposition. There is first the Bacchic mode which describes literary creation as joyful drunkenness and whose purpose is to provide pleasure and recreation. But another idea of creative writing intervenes to contradict the Bacchic injunctions, one that infers gravity of intent and of meaning. It is argued that this second mode be rightfully designated as “Apollonian,” and that, in reducing Plato's tetrad of furors to Bacchus and his frère ennemi, Rabelais intuited that truth which Nietzsche would explore three centuries later in The Birth of Tragedy—that these two gods have stood eternally opposed as the archetypal poles of the tension vital to the creative process.

The divided self in James’s fiction may be regarded as an inevitable structural consequence of James’s desire to dramatize the problem of the free spirit in an enslaving world. But the divided self required by art is not essentially different from the divided self known to psychology, and an understanding of the anxieties of that self, particularly of the “obsessive imagery” James uses to depict those anxieties, enriches our understanding of James’s work. The fear of a world that threatens one’s being issues in an elaborate development of an escape motif; of imagery of seizure by the eye and by the world of appearances; and of imagery of petrification, reflecting a dread of being turned into a mere tool or machine. James’s vision of “the great trap of life” permits him to come to terms with his own limitations and culminates in a searching philosophic examination of the problem of free will and determinism.

Over the years, Webster criticism has been haunted by a tendency to see the essential conflict in the tragedies as a struggle between the forces of good and evil. In recent years, critics have scarcely approached the possibility that his vision may be a paradox in which both sides of an apparent contradiction are equally “true.” The antitheses in Webster may not be good and evil so much as two irreconcilably opposed impulses of human nature that can be identified with the Nietzschean terms “Apollonian” and “Dionysian.” From this perspective Francisco, Monticelso, Ferdinand, or the Cardinal is not so much representative of evil as of the Apollonian obsession with obedience, responsibility, sexual restraint, and punishment. Vittoria and the Duchess, freed from moralistic quibbles, are Dionysian rebels. Flamineo and Bosola, like the rest of us, are caught between the demands of equally imperative but mutually exclusive ways of seeing reality.

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.

The notion that the meaning of an idea is inseparable from its history is reflected in the way that Carlyle, Arnold, and Ruskin took recourse to historical categories of thought in their creations of meaning. Sartor Resartus, Culture and Anarchy, portions of The Stones of Venice, and the later volumes of Modern Painters are analyzed to suggest that the distinctive feature of the Victorian mind is not to be found in any of its diverse contents but rather in the way that history is made to function as a formal property of thought. Indeed, whereas Enlightenment and Romantic writers were inclined to locate the ground of intelligibility in forms of transcendence, the Victorians were forced by their sense of the historicity of things to derive their meanings from the world of processes and events, sequences and developments.

The fifteen “Life Studies” poems are distinguished as a separate work from the rest of the Life Studies volume. Their unicity arises from Lowell's use of the Freudian myths of maturation and the family romance, from a (largely Freudian) comic emphasis, and from a rhetorical, rather than merely confessional, project of the poet to vindicate himself by means such as Pound used in The Pisan Cantos. Lowell's parents are the victims of comic degradation in the poet's struggle to achieve maturity; his Grandfather Winslow is both a savior, as father surrogate, and a threat to dominate Lowell. A “plot” including parenthood, the loyal intimacy of his relationship with his wife, and Lowell's comic self-acceptance helps to give “Life Studies” a sense of renewed vitality. Also, Lowell's new, more open style reflects his response to the movements of the fifties in American poetry and supports the mythic and comic structures of renewal in the work.

Using Joseph Campbell’s aphorism “Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths” as a pointing device, this essay explores the resilience and breadth of medieval literature as it incorporates into a single purview many perspectives that seem incongruous to the literary taste of later times. The argument maintains that the presence of a common myth to which the society generally adheres accounts for most essential differences between medieval and modern poetry, affecting not only the multiple ways in which the language functions but also the relationship of poet to idea and poem, and the vigorous interplay between poet and audience. The essay treats half a dozen Middle English lyrics, a poem by William Carlos Williams, and a fabiliau by Guerin.

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.