As a detailed chronology of the composition demonstrates, Richardson revised Clarissa carefully and thoroughly before its first publication and consulted several of his friends about it, but his correspondence does not show that he changed his basic plan or took advice from anyone on important matters. The first extant references to the novel are in letters from Edward Young and Aaron Hill in June and July 1744. By this time the general plan of the novel was fixed and a first version may have been already completed. It was certainly completed early in 1746. By that time Richardson had begun an extensive revision, and before publication he revised once again. A study of his revisions shows that he was especially concerned about reducing the length of his book, and he also blackened the character of Lovelace, tried to clarify the motives of his characters, and elevated his language.

William Hazlitt's ideas about the imagination have received widespread critical attention, but that attention has been confined almost entirely to his comments on the “sympathetic imagination.” In his opening sentence J. D. O'Hara (“Hazlitt and the Functions of the Imagination,” PMLA, LXXXI, December 1966, 552–562) intends, I think, to use the term “sympathetic imagination” in a broad sense—broader than in his second paragraph, where, in order to disclose “the limitations of sympathy in the creation of art,” Mr. O'Hara seems to confine “sympathy” to the poet's identification with character. He proceeds, then, to designate “associational theory” rather than “sympathy” as grounds for Hazlitt's objection to egotistical poetry—like Wordsworth's—and to describe this objection as “basically not aesthetic but moral” (p. 553). Mr. O'Hara has written a closely reasoned and useful article; but when, later in the article, he describes the “formative imagination” (p. 561), he again separates elements in Hazlitt's aesthetic which, I think, are not as readily separable as he implies.

To write The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne drew on mid-nineteenthcentury theories of the prose romance and the central situation of New England romances. The romance was distinguished from the novel by the idea of artistic distance; romancers wanted to set human experience at a distance from their readers' world so that the meaning of the experience would be more clear. To get the distance exactly right, they balanced three sets of opposites: verisimilitude and ideality; the natural and the marvelous; and history and fiction. Hawthorne discussed each of the balances and used them as part of his conception of the form of The Scarlet Letter. The central situation of most contemporary romances about Puritanism provided him with the conflict of the “fair Puritan” and the “black Puritan.” Hester is his “fair Puritan” whose capacity for feeling is opposed to the reasoned but harsh justice of his “black Puritan,” Chillingworth. These two characters in their roles as types define the extreme sides of the moral argument Hawthorne synthesizes in the complex characterization of Dimmesdale.

Though Burns enunciated no critical precepts on the comedy of love, he composed much of his best poetry not only within the eighteenth-century sanction of aggressive wit but also according to the tradition of humor as it later became associated with the distinctively Romantic expression of the comic spirit. Illustrative poems and letters reveal his mirthful delineation of human affection. With extraordinary insight into the realities of amatory experience, he treated a rich variety of subjects—the multifarious joys and problems of courtship, unrestrained passion, adultery, unwed parenthood, marriage, artificial conventions and morals, alcoholic stimulation, and defiance of social hypocrisy. His sympathy with the essential seriousness of love counterbalanced a perceptive awareness of human frailties; his basically empathic approach to the dilemmas of love often coalesced with portrayals of ludicrous situations or character traits that invited laughter. It was the fusion of these seemingly antithetical elements that impressed his nineteenth-century admirers, and this outstanding achievement has become increasingly significant in the light of more recent psychological analyses.

In The Playboy of the Western World Synge portrays the successive stages in the artistic growth of a poet. Christy Mahon develops markedly from the time when he shyly and tersely answers questions on his crime. Gradually, his flat statements give way to more daring and assertive speech so that others remark on his poetic power. Their praise generates further poetic attempts, and Christy's speech becomes both more concrete in diction and more deliberately imaginative. But when he discovers that his poetry was not based on actual fact, his speech changes distinctly: it temporarily becomes self-conscious and hollow. Inevitably the crowd turns on him, but the playboy rises above them and their objections; the very audience which nurtured the growing poet eventually threatens him in his maturity, and must be disregarded by the poet, since it cannot understand the imaginative truth of his statements. The artistic growth of the main character is signified by a variety of styles; thus the play supplies examples of Synge's best poetry, but also deliberate exaggerations of poetic expression.

George Chapman's source for every important incident in the Strozza subplot of The Gentleman Usher was Chapter x of De Abditis Nonnullis ac mirandis morborum & sanationum causis liber, a collection of medical case histories written in Latin by Antonio Benivieni, a fifteenth-century Florentine physician and associate of Ficino. Both works are informed with Neo- Platonism. Chapman took from Benivieni's work several key phrases and in cidental details. Possibly echoing Italian political names, he added a villain, Medice, and changed the name of the protagonist from Gaspar to Strozza; to establish a Platonic parallel with Vincentio and Margaret of the main plot, he replaced Gaspar's spiritual counselor, a friend named Marioctus, with a wife, Cynanche, who serves the same function. The names Strozza and Cynanche contribute significant lexical meanings to the play: strozza is Italian for “throat,” and κυνάγχη Greek for both “sore throat” and “dog collar”; primarily, Cynanche is a collar to her husband in the common Renaissance symbol of discipline. Poetic elaboration aside, Chapman's only other important alteration was to allow Strozza to retain, in an apparently weakened form, the prophetic gift which Gaspar lost immediately after his miraculous cure.

The notebook, which disappeared from the Library of Congress sometime after its first, incomplete publication in 1921, has been described and analyzed from an imperfect microfilm copy. The new information discloses that, although the notebook was used until 1854–55, the traditional date of 1847 for most of the contents is correct. Although the notebook is close to the 1855 Leaves of Grass in its poetical material, it shows relatively little influence from specific events, politics, or literary ideas in Whitman's formative period.

The widespread feeling that Auden's poetic powers have declined steadily since the thirties, which is epitomized in an essay like Randall Jarrell's “Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden's Poetry,” is based on a misunderstanding of both his intellectual and stylistic evolution. By taking adequate account of the important stylistic shift which moved Auden away from his early Anglo-Saxon and Hopkinsesque addictions and made it possible for him to express a more straightforward and centrally human concern in the poetry of his middle period, we can appraise his achievement more accurately. This crucial and beneficial shift, which owes something to Yeats, begins in Look, Stranger! (1936) and is characterized by Auden's new willingness to face the dangers and failures of the period directly in lucid, reflective, fully syntactic speech. The full-throated, implicated, moving human voice which emerges here, concerned not with extravagance or exaggeration but with facing the truth and accounting for it, is largely responsible for Auden's preeminence among English poets born in this century.