D. H. Lawrence's art is not so loose as many critics have thought. Indeed, his most characteristic stories reveal a coherent form that rests on various rhythmic devices: repeated scenes, phrases, and characters. These may be called conventional rhythmic devices, but the form of these stories rests chiefly on Lawrence's unique rhythmic devices: the dynamic relations of attraction-repulsion between his characters and his expanding rhythmic imagery that enables him to reveal direct psychic experience. E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and E. K. Brown's Rhythm in the Novel provide the theoretical background for the term, “rhythm,” but Lawrence's use of rhythm in fiction is only partly explained in these critics' terms. “The Horse Dealer's Daughter” is a perfect example of rhythmic form in Lawrence's work: the dynamic, to-and-fro rhythm between death and life, between the daily self controlled by the will and the essential self guided by desire, between the two lovers each separate and other who touch and draw apart, touch and draw apart. And all these rhythms are gradually transformed from the realistic to the psychic or unconscious world through repeated and expanding images of eyes, hands, waters.

Mark Twain's disenchantment with the boy hero of his first novel is revealed in a series of significant changes which distinguish the Tom Sawyer of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the Tom Sawyer of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In Tom Sawyer, Tom's cruelty is essentially a by-product of his failure to consider the consequences of his actions; when he does consider, he feels remorse. In Huckleberry Finn, cruelty is a primary motive in all Tom's plans. Tom's interest in rules in Tom Sawyer is a minor aspect of his character and in fact supports his larger role of exposing the rigidities and hypocrisies of the rule- ridden society of St. Petersburg; in Huckleberry Finn, Tom's interest in rules is an obsession which makes him the butt rather than the agent of exposure and intensifies his cruelty. Tom is the natural leader of the world of Tom Sawyer because each of his schemes provides pleasure for those concerned. In Huckleberry Finn, Tom has nothing of value to offer; he maintains his control instead through a series of tyrannies. The ending of Huckleberry Finn is a major exposure of Tom's cruelty and of the connection between cruelty and pleasure in his mind.

Thomas Carlyle's writing has been deplored by some critics, Northrop Frye among them, as anachronistic; to the extent, however, that Carlyle considered time a “liar” and a “universal wonder-hider,” he deliberately employed anachronism both structurally and thematically in his work to express his most characteristic insights. The material of Past and Present, for example, is put together so as not merely to emphasize the relevance of past events to present conditions but also to insist upon their identity and even, curiously enough, their simultaneity. The structures of his works thus resemble those of the Eddas, described by him as tales of “successive generations” which are nevertheless “flung out for us in one level of distance… like a picture painted on the same canvas.” This phenomenological view of history, in which contiguity replaces continuity as the key relationship between the elements of experience, also informs Carlyle's politics and economics, giving to them their familiar intensity and antirational bias, without, however, rendering them entirely impractical. Insofar as Carlyle's anachronism represents the writer's stubborn resistance to change, it may properly be deplored. But insofar as it means rejection of the tyranny of mechanical chronology, it is a phenomenon in the author's work worthy of study.

The fact that Georg Trakl's poetry frequently contains allusions to Hölderlin, Rimbaud, the Bible, and to various additional authors is well known. The presence of Büchner's Lenz and of some other texts in Traum und Umnachtung has, however, not yet been recognized. Some twenty-two specific passages from Lenz, adapted and modified in various ways, occur in the second section of Traum und Umnachtung. In addition, Trakl paraphrases texts by Nietzsche in the first section and cites Hölderlin in the third; the last section comprises most of the major themes from Trakl's own work. The concentration of allusions to a specific author in single sections of Traum und Umnachtung suggests that Trakl's use of citations is conscious. Such a recognition does not involve an “intentional fallacy”: the author's intention, in incorporating allusions and quotations into his work, is comparable to his intention in choosing a certain kind of form. Both citations and forms can be identified with the proper training: a work of literature containing conscious allusions (Zitatendichtung)must be treated as a literary form in its own right, in which even simple, apparently descriptive phrases no longer refer to objects or experiences, but to the tradition of poetic language. (In German)

Emerson's place in our poetic tradition is granted to be central, despite the elusive and variable style of his poetry. Because he was an avowed experimenter, the development of Emerson's style must be traced quite apart from the Emersonian ideas sometimes offered as his complete poetic stance. Throughout, his poetry can be called meditative in aim, and is based on a question-and-answer form dramatized as an encounter between the poet and Nature; the prototype is in the introduction to Nature (1836). There are three phases in his career: (1) poems of 1834 modeled after George Herbert and the art of neatness also visible in Nature; (2) the vision of wild, bardic freedom (1839-41), which led Emerson to a looser form and to the techniques of Anglo-Saxon poetry as they were understood by his contemporaries; (3) a wearing away of enthusiasm, spurred by Emerson's losses and growing skepticism in the 1840's. Then the techniques used to express bardic freedom take on a different color, no longer bold heavy strokes but witty, nimble leaps; in the central encounter Nature turns sly and contemptuous, refusing to answer questions directly, while the poet is passive, though serene and appreciative, in the face of a world much less knowable than in 1836. In. the third and major phase the poetry becomes compressed in both form and consciousness, a movement toward the “titmouse dimension.” And this style, more than his contribution to Whitman's bardism, is Emerson's legacy to modern American poets.

Edwin Muir's poem, “The Gate,” not only marks literally the dividing point in his work between almost unrelieved darkness and increasing light, but, in every detail of its complex structure and in controlling metaphor, it signals the loss of innocence, the intimate acquaintance with evil, which Muir's later poems suggest must be endured before there can be any true knowledge of good. Both halves, into which the poem is cut by a strong caesura in the twelfth line, plunge in parallel downward movements from security into loss and fear; and although a secondary movement, based on a metaphor of initiation, carries the poem forward, over the threshold of “The Gate,” this forward step also turns out to be downward. Because of Muir's persistent association of a castle with treachery from within, as his novel, The Three Brothers, and several poems show, the step into the fortress of adulthood is simultaneously a drop into the central darkness and terror of the universe.

One of Robert Graves's favorites among his own poems is “The Naked and the Nude,” frequently anthologized but rarely commented upon by critics. Sir Kenneth Clark's The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956), a work of art history, most likely served as the initial stimulus for this poem. The initial chapter of Clark's book, which appeared one year before Graves's poem, has the same title as the poem. Analysis shows that the poem develops an argument for frank, direct nakedness as opposed to cunning, prurient nudity; this argument is also implied in Clark's monumental study of nude art. Further, Clark is himself influenced by various English poets; hence, a reciprocal process is here at woik, resulting in a cross-pollination between two distinct disciplines. Discovery of this catalyst for Graves's poem is valuable because it provides us with insights into the nature of Graves's imaginative processes, and it also helps to explain Graves's preference for this poem.

In spite of the marked degree to which twentieth-century art and literature have reflected the influence of mechanization on modern experience, the dominant tone of American literary treatments of the machine remains one of tension. Particularly apparent in the novel, this tension functions as a central conflict in books by Norris, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner, and others. It is most evident in novels about World War II, when mechanization, industrialism, and statism reached their violent zenith, and is nowhere better illustrated than in Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. A structural pattern that reveals the army as the epitome of the machine in a society that is universally mechanistic, a symbolically pivotal clash between the natural organic world and the invading machine, and imagery and style drawn from the substance and language of the machine world, all combine to form a total metaphoric environment in which the central characters personify and articulate the opposing values of the machine-oriented “system” and the will to individual integrity. Thus the function of the machine as a controlling metaphor in American World War II novels is underlined and clarified by the informing centrality of that metaphor in the first really significant, probably the best, and certainly the most imitated of those novels.

The focal dimension of Dostoevsky's creative effort in his later period is his compelling esthetic and metaphysical concern with ultimate violence, particularly in its doctrinaire or ideological aspect. The act of murder is seen as a “crime of reason,” an outgrowth of modern man's autarkic intellect. It is this “crime of reason” in accordance with his metaphysical esthetics that Dostoevsky constitutes as the transgression but also a potential felix culpa leading through suffering and expiation to ultimate rebirth. Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov each present an individuated version of this archetypal scheme. Raskolnikov emerges at the end of Crime and Punishment on the threshold of “a new life.” In The Possessed, Stavrogin's potentially “positive” performance perverts itself into “a quest for damnation.” Dmitri Karamazov undergoes spiritual regeneration even though falling short of complete redemption. In thus restating the timeless relevance of the archetypal pattern of rebirth through sin and expiation, Dostoevsky brings a mythical perspective to his vision of the Russia of his time.

Although Frost's first volume is consistently taken to be a random collection of lyrics, this does not square with the poet's remarks about it. In both private and public writings, Frost indicated that the lyrics were selected and arranged into a narrative sequence tracing the development of a youth through what he at one point summarized as a “Phase of Post-adolescence.” The lyrics follow the youth from initial, immature withdrawal from society, to final, mature acceptance of himself both as an individual and as a budding poet. But this narrative intent is recognizable only when the first edition of A Boy's Will is examined, because Frost made significant changes in later versions. For a variety of reasons, the first edition does not esthetically satisfy as a narrative cycle. Nevertheless, showing in detail how Frost sought to impose a narrative frame on the lyrics is significant in two ways. It makes it possible to suggest, in the course of the discussion, readings of individual poems which differ from those which the poet himself, sometimes tacitly, sometimes overtly, later endorsed. In the larger context, it provides insight into the position of the thirty-eight-year-old poet at the beginning of his public career; A Boy's Will emerges at once as Frost's retrospective look at what he had been, and a harbinger of what he would become.

In Part III of Stello Vigny's concept of Destiny in historical and personal events is set forth by Blaireau, Doctor Noir's servant who is also part-time gunner in the French Revolution. Blaireau's first appearance reflects the fact that radical political changes can occur in one man's lifetime, and this reinforces Vigny's larger point in the novel, that to seek political fortune is a tenuous and vulnerable business. Blaireau's second appearance demonstrates Vigny's notions on the existence of blind Chance in history as opposed to Joseph de Maistre's idea of a beneficent Providence. In his third appearance Blaireau unwittingly causes the downfall of Robespierre and is consequently called “l'homme de la Destinée” by Doctor Noir. By “Destiny” Vigny means the capriciousness of events that alter the lives of persons and of nations. As for man's freedom, Vigny provides man with a leeway whereby he can mold events in his life and direct, to a certain extent, the powers of Destiny. While only “superior men” succeed at this, all men, including Blaireau, are given the possibility for doing so. Negatively Blaireau demonstrates the vulnerability of political fortune; positively he implies the possibility of resisting the powers that rule over man. His three appearances at beginning, middle, and end of the Chénier episode give esthetic and ideological unity to the work.

Contrary to its negative reputation, Céline's literary opus, with the exception of Voyage au bout de la nuit, evolves toward a spirit of regeneration. Although inVoyage Céline shows the image of death as a paralyzing force to derive from man's egoism, his own artistic vision remains too self-centered to allow him to follow his intuition of the beauty of life. Mort à crédit, Casse-pipe, and Guignol's Band, as novels of initiation, are an attempt to eradicate this egoism, and the presence of death is now counterbalanced both by a structure that permits of catharsis and by the creation of archetypal figures representing the superior value of life. The pamphlets, despite their treatment of the Jews, emphasize and elucidate this shift towards affirmation. The novels of maturity, Féerie pour une autre fois, D'un château l'autre, and Nord, through their structure and symbolism, make explicit that Céline's basic artistic intention has become not only to transcend the disintegration of Western civilization but to provide the mechanism for a similar transcendence in his reader. In Rigodon, he reaches a level of contemplation from which even the collapse of a civilization can be seen as promising new life.

Though not a wholly successful work, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur is more coherent, more serious in intent, than is usually acknowledged. Dramatically and thematically organized in terms of the opposition between Launcelot and Gawayne, the work is best described as “tragedy of consequence.” Launcelot's adultery with Gaynour is ostensibly the root cause of the destruction of Arthur's realm, but the poet transfers the principal blame to others, above all to Gawayne. He achieves this by (a) distinguishing the adultery itself from its revelation to Arthur; (b) depicting the illicit love as favorably as possible; and (c) creating an implicit duality in the characters of Launcelot and Gawayne. The two undergo a reversal of primary roles by which Gawayne becomes the aggressor and Launcelot the placator. As the hero, Launcelot comes to embody the wiser course of action— withdrawal from worldly conflict—which leads him, eventually, to the priesthood. Confusion, however, results from the viewpoint of the narrator, who seems so indiscriminately generous with his praise that he contradicts the obvious implications of the course of events. This difficulty is resolved when one understands that the narrator's compassion transcends, not contradicts, the rigorous justice of events.