This Moment has Been Looming for Three Years Now, Ever since I heard the election results, and the complicated feelings that arose then are still in place. Amazement, first of all, because it's still hard to believe that a translator from SUNY Cortland could stand at this podium. Awe and humility, for sure, because I know something about my illustrious predecessors and how far I am from filling their shoes. A bit of sheer terror, too: I suspect that comes with the territory. But most of all, gratitude, immense gratitude, for the opportunity to collaborate with the extraordinary colleagues that make this huge, multifaceted association work so well. By colleagues I mean in particular the past two presidents and the two current vice presidents, with whom I've worked closely and from whom I've learned so much; the Executive Council members, all stars in their own right who know how to work productively as a team and have fun in the process; and especially our inspiring and gifted leader Rosemary G. Feal and her formidable staff. I can't name them all, but I want to thank them all, to acknowledge and applaud their integrity and intelligence, their creativity and commitment, their people skills and their many other skills that keep this big ship on course. The association is going through hard financial times, as you know, but we're in excellent hands, and I'm confident that we'll emerge from the ordeal leaner, perhaps, but stronger than ever.

This essay uses the example of the long‐lived and popular Burma‐Shave advertising campaign to argue that literary critics should extend their attention to the vast amounts of poetry written for advertising purposes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Burma‐Shave campaign—which featured sequences of rhyming billboards erected along highways in the United States from 1926 to 1963—not only cultivated characteristics of literary and even avantgarde writing but effectively pressured that literariness into serving the commercial marketplace. At the same time, as the campaign's reception history shows, the spirit of linguistic play and innovation at the core of Burma‐Shave's poetry unintentionally distracted consumers' attention away from the commercial message and toward the creative forces of reading and writing poetry. A striking example of popular reading practices at work, this history shows how poetry created even in the most commercial contexts might resist the commodification that many twentieth‐century poets and critics feared. (MC)

It is sometimes said that unlike other epics Beowulf does not start in medias res, but it does; Beowulf has a backstory, which we are deep into when the poem begins. The backstory is not told in the poem, however, so modern readers may miss it entirely. It is found in the poem's analogues and was the focus of most Beowulf scholarship until 1936, when J. R. R. Tolkien turned our attention to the monster fights in the foreground. Following Tolkien, today's readers focus on what the poem does say, taking little or no interest in the analogues. There is quite a difference, however, between reading Beowulf as complete in itself and reading it intertextually, as part of a cycle of tales. An intertextual reading yields many surprises, among them a hidden incest theme. Beowulf is haunted by this and other dark matters, repressed in its textual unconscious.

Discussions of early nationalism need to focus not just on how incipient nations differentiated themselves from international communities, such as the Roman church, but also on how smaller territories fitted into more expansive composite monarchies, in which one king ruled several lands that had separate traditions and laws. Thomas Malory dramatizes the latter situation by having King Arthur's major knights come from lands subject to the English crown but located outside England: Wales, Ireland, Orkney. In their tense efforts to build a fellowship, the knights personify the troubles of building a nation that grows by hybridizing various regional identities. Malory makes Launcelot come from Gascony and dramatizes the shifts in national imagination necessary in England (and France) as Launcelot's lands shift from being autonomous to being held by the English to being part of a newly constituted France.

Literary theory in the twentieth century was heavily influenced by linguistics. The structuralist model that set the waves of literary theories in motion originated in Saussurean linguistics and its Jakobsonian elaborations. One could argue that until the 1980s all literary theory, and all linguistics for that matter, was based on an analysis of langue, or the system of language or literature or text, to the detriment of parole, the practices, contexts, and negotiations of speakers, writers, and readers. The structuralist model, with its theoretical expansion of close-reading practices, already entrenched in the wake of the New Criticism, generalized the frame of mind that was soon to become the bogeyman of poststructuralist and cultural studies attacks. The formula could be summarized as No history, no ethics, no themes, no aesthetics, and no context—period.

Anglo‐Saxonists often explore connections between The Dream of the Rood and two ritual objects, the silver Brussels cross and the sandstone Ruthwell monument, inscribed with verses related to the poem. This essay offers a new perspective on these artifacts, elucidating not a historical narrative linking them but rather an Anglo‐Saxon poetics made visible in their juxtaposition. It argues that these three manifestations reveal a dialectic of inscription and performance in Anglo‐Saxon poetics. Reading the familiar Old English text through J. H. Prynne's “A Note on Metal” (1968), which imagines dialectics both of metal and stone and of inscription and performance, the essay also interrogates certain divisions between premodern and modern aesthetic traditions. Theories of media, performance, and inscriptionality help to stage an interdisciplinary analysis of The Dream of the Rood and to show that its poetics originate in the formal frameworks of Anglo‐Saxon material culture. (SC)

Recent scholarship has located John Fletcher's The Island Princess (1621) in the historical context of the early modern “spice race” but has not addressed the extent to which the intra‐European tensions staged in the play also enact an international contest for symbolic and cultural resources. Taking as its starting point Fletcher's acknowledged sources, Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola's Conquista de las islas Malucas (1609) and Louis Gédoyn de Bellan's “Histoire memorable de Dias espagnol, et de Quixaire princesse de Moluques” (1615), this essay places The Island Princess in the thick of an appropriative process that moved from Portugal's periphery to Spain, from Spain to France, and from the Continent to England. In doing so, it also traces the contours of a mercantilist logic that linked political dominance, literary hegemony, and economic supremacy—and pursued all three as mutually reinforcing national goals.

In “Tomida femina” (“A swollen woman”), a tenth-century charm written in Occitan, the vernacular of the south of France, a birthing woman and her helpers intone magical language during the most intense moments of childbirth. The poem permits us, with brief but uncommon intimacy, to imagine the lives of women long ago. It takes its place in a European tradition of birthing charms, including others written in Latin, German, and English. These charms, and in particular “Tomida femina,” provide an image of vigorous medieval women in childbirth that precedes the images of women in other secular Romance lyrics—young girls in love in the Mozarabic kharjas, idealized ladies in troubadour songs, and passionate aristocratic women in the poetry of the Occitan trobairitz.

Reader! No time for pleasantries.

The study of poetry is still obstructed and dominated by the unsolved question as to what poetry is. Most have concluded that it is unproductive to try to answer this question too quickly or even, perhaps, to ask it. This creates a block. Where terms such as poetry, lyric, and form remain academically current, they may do so as a kind of revered but disbelieved magic. Lyric suffers from some of the same difficulties as poetry (Culler; Prins; Terada). These difficulties go further than those attending any indistinct yet prevalent cultural concept. They concern also the long “war embrace” between poetry and philosophy, an antagonistic cooperation (Coleridge 191).

Simon Pokagon's writings exemplify a complex process of linguistic‐material worldmaking. His birch‐bark booklets bring together multiple cultural traditions, including nineteenth‐century tourist art, traditional Algonquian writing, and a long history of writing on bark that dates to the early history of writing itself. Neither purely things nor purely texts, these documents interweave nature and culture in such a way that Pokagon can be said to be engaging in a process of naturalization whereby the cultural is presented as a feature of nature. To promote his reformist agenda, Pokagon capitalizes on a rich cache of naturalist symbolism that was of particularly high cultural value in Victorian America. What is perhaps most notable about Pokagon's use of naturalization is that he makes this linguistic trope into a materialist discourse. (JB)

Recent comparative approaches to early American studies have described the networks of literary exchange that linked colonial writing from different imperial contexts. Current methodologies should be expanded to account for the relation between colonial writing and indigenous forms of political media. This essay compares two colonial texts, the Eendracht writings (1632—34), by a group of Dutch colonial agents, and Simplicities Defence (1646), the Puritan Samuel Gorton's appeal to Parliament. While these texts present radically different versions of New World sovereignty, both use print reproductions of indigenous political media to construct models of republican colonial order that are meant to contrast with Spanish New World regimes. The editorial practices authors employed in preparing indigenous texts for publication often embodied the political relation between imperial states and indigenous polities.

This essay begins by showing how the criticisms of neologism that Dante in-herited from ancient and medieval rhetoric, especially those that decry the supposed barbarity of invented words, provide counterintuitive insight into the motives behind Dante's lexical experimentalism in the Commedia. It then turns to the metaphoric link between Horace's defense of neologisms in the Ars poetica (The Art of Poetry [18 BCE]) and Adam's speech on the origin of language in Paradiso 26, a relation whose Homeric and Vergilian resonances inflect Dante's understanding of linguistic cycles. I argue that Dante's rewriting through Horace of the infernal, Vergilian simile of the falling leaves establishes a poetics of regeneration in Paradiso that joins the process of word creation to the miracle of the Resurrection and to the time‐bound, cyclic nature of what Adam calls the linguistic “uso d'i mortali” ‘usage of mortals.’