The centrality of the twenty “Mottetti” to Montale's decisive second book, Le Occasioni (1939), has been noted by such critics as Ettore Bonora and Silvio Ramat. Despite their probings, however, much remains to be done towards an organic understanding of this remarkable series of poems. Since this part of Montale's work relates to much else he has written before and after, I shall not attempt to isolate it from the rest of the Occasioni book, but merely to keep my focus on what is after all a kind of book within the book. A tighter unity prevails among the “Motets” than among the other poems in the volume, both because the former all turn on the constant of love for Clizia in the variations of worldly vicissitudes, and because they match this thematic constancy by a relative constancy of form.

As our profession grows larger and more diverse, as its opportunities increase, the proper conduct of our national meetings becomes a matter of legitimate concern. This booklet brings together explanations and regulations developed over the years. We urge that group officers and readers of papers—and any member who thinks that he may ever read a paper, lead a discussion, or organize a program at the Annual Meeting—read all of the booklet carefully so that they may see how each activity contributes to the success of the whole meeting, which now numbers more than 12,000 in attendance, more than 100 different programs in three days, as many as 600 individual participants, and in 1967 begins to occupy the full facilities of two separate, major hotels.

The profound change which became evident in Yeats's poetry with the publication of The Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914) was due in large measure to his defiant adoption of an aristocratic outlook and a corresponding expression of anti-democratic sentiments. It has generally been held that Castiglione's The Courtier, to which Lady Gregory introduced him in (probably) 1907, and his visit with her in the same year to Urbino, Ferrara, Ravenna, and Florence acted as the most important cultural stimuli behind his conversion to the aristocratic ideal and his conviction that this was most perfectly realized during the Renaissance. Yet during the period 1901–06 Yeats had been engaged in a continuous study of the three greatest writers of the English Renaissance. And it was in this process, I submit, that his commitment to the Renaissance, to aristocratic values, and, what is more, to an aristocratically oriented poetry, was finally accomplished.

Oedipus is a man who was told he had killed his father and married his mother.He has to account for a past which is his own past, though it falls on him like somebody else's. Antigone, in order to throw a handful of earth on her brother's body, has to break the laws of the city state. She chooses a gesture which by law is punished by death. Orestes, to avenge his father, has to kill his murderers: his own mother and stepfather.

It is an honour to be asked to speak at the general session of the MLA. Every scholar in the Humanities would glow with pride as I did when I received your invitation. Thank you. Thank you for your hospitality, thank you for your welcome, and here let me salute your indomitable President Mr. Weigand. This talk has its genesis in a question which my secretary put to me when I was clearing things up in Cambridge in July 1964 before going off for my summer holiday—she said: “Did you know that this year you have been visited by 123 American academics?” It was true. Presidents, Deans, professors, members of faculty and of administration flowed like a sparkling stream through my office. Let me assure you that they did not come all as single spies. Sometimes they came in battalions, one contingent being in fact—I search for the right noun of collection—a regality or, perhaps, an in-sultanate of Regents.

A common assumption about the humanities used to be that they were always the same: both their subject matter and the ways of studying them were invariable. “The proper study of mankind is man” was an evident enough truth, and when one got down to the study, one found oneself at best working over again “what oft was thought but ne'er so well express'd.”

The closing episode of Der neue Menoza involves a lively argument between the representatives of two generations of Germans about the essential purpose of the theatrical experience. A bluff-mannered father, honest and hard-working—a prototype of the “people” in their relatively unspoiled state—likes to go to the puppet theater and laugh at Hanswurst. His educated, super-refined son scoffs at such crude entertainment: “Was die schöne Natur nicht nachahmt, Papa! Das kann unmöglich gefallen … was für Vergnügen können Sie an einer Vorstellung finden, in der nicht die geringste Illusion ist. … Es gibt gewisse Regeln für die Täuschung, das ist, für den sinnlichen Betrug, da ich glaube das wirklich zu sehen, was mir doch nur vorgestellt wird.” Disturbed in his healthy naïveté, the father agrees to test his beloved “Püppelspiel” by the new standards; but he returns home in a fury, roaring, “Du Hund! willst du ehrlichen Leuten ihr Pläsier verderben? Meinen ganzen Abend mir zu Gift gemacht … [sagst] mir von dreimaleins and schöne Natur, daß ich den ganzen Abend da gessessen bin wie ein Narr … gezählt und gerechnet und nach der Uhr gesehen; ich will dich lehren mir Regeln vorschreiben, wie ich mich amüsieren soll.”

Todo estudio y crítica referente al Poema de Mio Cid hace constar un hecho característico del mismo, su realismo. Sin embargo, creo que, por unas u otras razones, no se ha llegado a señalar claramente la verdadera importancia y alcance de ese realismo, o mejor dicho, su auténtica significación. Mi intención, en las líneas que siguen, es tratar de ponerla de relieve. Espero, con todo, no “imitar al pilluelo que, al ver una pared recién blanqueada, siente necesidad de mancharla escribiendo en ella alguna inconveniencia,” como don Ramón Menéndez Pidal, maestro en todo lo referente al Poema como en tantas otras cosas, ha dicho de los posibles cidófobos posteriores a su magno trabajo. No voy a tratar del Cid especialmente como personaje humano e histórico—aspecto al que don Ramón se refiere con las anteriores palabras—sino de la trama material y realista que el Poema ofrece a los ojos de quienes lo leemos hoy. Hay que tener en cuenta para ello, también, que otro rasgo bien conocido del Cantar es su verismo, “que rebosa por todas partes,”hasta el punto de que incluso “en menudos pormenores coincide el Poema con los datos históricos.” Milá y Fontanals lo consideraba como “fidelísimo espejo de un orden de hechos y costumbres que no serían bastantes a suplir los documentas históricos.” Sera inevitable, pues, que en algunos puntos de este trabajo me refiera también a la persona del Cid, quien, después de todo, si no puede ser considerado como un santo, tampoco como hombre sin honor ni ideales.

Offspring, in the fullness of time, have to come of age; young nations have to come of age; so too with the language of young nations. And, as we are often slow to recognize, the experience of achieving maturity may be traumatic no less for the parent than the child. Yet time does its work, and has done it for our language; so that now not even the most jealous of the ancient nations can deny that the relatively young United States is old enough to vote—that our literature has earned the franchise, and that the language as we speak and write it today has established its individuality and identity.

Any critic writing on Polyeucle must come to grips with a problem that is specific to this particular play (not merely generic, as the conflict between two kinds of “love-duty”). He must ask himself, “Why did Corneille, the poet of heroic humanism, choose to write about Christian martyrdom?” I do not believe it is an adequate answer to say that he did not write about Christian martyrdom but, once again, about heroic humanism. It must have been obvious to Corneille that on the one hand martyrdom had something in common with heroism and on the other that it provided a new variation on the theme. The question, then, is to identify this new variation, to determine the quiddity of Polyeucte, the special light it throws on the Cornelian glorification of man. If Corneille's theater as a whole is about idealism, its potential and its dangers, then the Christian idealism of the martyr is particular in several ways. It demands the ultimate sacrifice, which is not necessarily demanded of the secular hero. The martyr must not only risk his life, he must give it. At the same time, it promises an ultimate in glory. Thus, both the “danger” and the “potential” are extreme. It is this aspect of martyrdom that enters the dramaturgy of Polyeucte in the conflicts between the heroic Christian idealism of Polyeucte and Néarque and the various forms and levels of religious and secular idealism represented by the other characters (and Polyeucte and Néarque) at different moments of the play. But there is a related yet even more fundamental aspect of martyrdom that is built into the fabric and structure of Polyeucle. As Tertullian wrote (A pologeticus, Ch. i), “The more you mow us down, the more quickly we grow; the blood of Christians is fresh seed.” Grace, working through the example of the martyr, leads others to augment the ranks of the Christians. It is this theme of emulation that is central in Polyeucte and forms the link between the two worlds of heroic humanism and Christian martyrdom. As has often been pointed out, admiration is a key emotion in Corneille's theatre. But it is not solely an emotion the playwright hopes to evoke in the spectator; it is also a basic response of many characters to the noble and courageous actions of other characters and a response they hope to arouse in others by their own actions. Now the term admiration, the act of gazing at with wonder, can (and did at times in the Latin) imply strong approval and desire. Admiration may, as it very often does in Corneille, lead to emulation. I should like to suggest that in this theme the seventeenth-century dramatist discovered a religious analogue to the admiring imitation of a model or an ideal self-image that we find typical of so many of his secular heroes.

To scan The Duino Elegies once more, forty years after the poet's death, smothered as they are under an avalanche of interpretations, is a hazardous venture. To do so for a body of readers including many who know this poetry only through the blurring medium of translation seems questionable. To single out one of the Elegies, moreover, and present its poetic statement as embedded in the matrix of a much larger whole, within the space of a short paper, seems impossible. The hope that a group of serious students, perceptive to all the nuances of Rilke's mythopoeic language, will find something not only new but valid in my exposition, prompts me to this essay. For those readers who have command of the secondary literature I wish to state that I have pondered and thoroughly digested many commentaries, including the latest and most voluminous by Jacob Steiner.

The pardoner's lines in the Introduction to the Pardoner's Tale contain the nucleus of nine decades of concentrated debate. Aleslake and drynke represent but two of the elements spinning about the core of controversy. Alestake has led numerous commentators to conclude that the Canterbury caravan halted (in or) at a roadside inn and there heard a revealing narrative from one of their fellows. Partial dissenters concede a momentary pause at the pub but contend the pilgrims retook the road before the Pardoner finished his (Prologue or) Tale. Some opposing critics refuse to concede even a momentary respite. Commentary on drynke has gravitated similarly toward three conflicting forces: Some attribute the Pardoner's self-revelation to drunkenness, others see him as loose-tongued but just lightly tipsy, and still others consider him stone sober throughout.

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”

The comedias of the Golden Age in Spain present a field of investigation that seems to be inexhaustible. The dramatic productions of that unbelievably exuberant period are so numerous that no one can hope to read them all. Even to try to keep up with the research based upon them is a task of the first magnitude. These plays have been studied from the point of view of sources, dramatic technique, versification, style, dates of the plays, authorship, and much, much else.

It has been said with some justice that during the past one hundred years committees have functioned as the task forces of American educational reform. It might also have been added that the preliminary scouting or reconnaissance has been accomplished through the device of the conference. It is quite likely, therefore, that a comparison of the aims, organization, and outlook of the Basic Issues Conference of 1958 and the Dartmouth Seminar of 1966 will serve to place in some kind of perspective the significant trends in English teaching which are taking place in the country today and which may continue to be influential for some time to come.