The editor's column in the March issue raised some questions about the recent decline in the number of essays submitted by men, about the merits of anonymous submissions and of our evaluation process, and about other matters. I invited members to share their thoughts on PMLA as a place to publish, and the responses are abundant, invigorating, dispiriting, quotable, predictable, and wonderfully informative. Since the scores of letters constitute a kind of informal survey, the first we have conducted for some time, I want to share some of the more telling observations, as well as the patterns that seem to emerge.

The replacement of the mechanical philosophy by an organic view of the cosmos is one of the most significant features of Romanticism. My article explains why the Romantics felt compelled to attack the mechanical philosophy and confirms Peckham's findings that the new organicism accounts for a large part of Romantic theory. This theory led to substantial progress in our understanding of the humanities. The Romantic world view is, however, no less flawed than the view it temporarily superseded: it is incompatible with the foundations of modern science.

Whitman's experimental poetic, a part of larger personal and national experiments, was severely tried by the assassination of President Lincoln. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” the poem occasioned by Lincoln's death, is not a traditional elegy but a crisis poem: in it, Whitman tests the efficacy of various poetic and linguistic forms and conventions in confronting the terrorism of history and the acute consciousness of time that the assassination triggered in him. While he acknowledges in “Lilacs” the attractions of elegiac conventions, narrative orders, symbolism, and transcendent lyricism, he learns in the course of the poem to do without them and the consolations they offer. “Lilacs” not only reaffirms Whitman's commitment to experimentalism but moves beyond his earlier major poems in its full consciousness and complete acceptance of the dangers and the necessity of forgoing the protection of conventions and traditional forms and orders.

Twice in the Comedy's last canto Dante refers to the binding of texts. The Sibyl's “light leaves” (lines 64-66) point to the danger of not binding texts: when the order of pages is lost, the text s meaning (sentenza) also vanishes. Medieval thinkers distinguished between the sequential perception (sensus) and the simultaneous perception (sententia) of a poem s elements. Because Dante released the poem in fascicles over a period of ten or more years, he needed to remind the reader in the last fascicle to bind the pages into a single volume. The final book image (85-90) indirectly performs this task. Appearing at the moment when the reader is at last able to pass from the poem s sensus to its sententia, these lines employ book binding as a metaphor for the perception of the text in its entirety. Their unusually polysemous language implies a triple analogy. God, poet, and reader are all artificers of a heavenly volume.

In the career of the once famous and now all but forgotten Oxford philologist F. Max Muller we may trace not only the changed assumptions about language brought about in the nineteenth century by comparative or scientific philology but also some of the subversive consequences of those assumptions for Victorian ideas of literature and culture. Muller succeeded with his audiences because he was able to reassure them that in the new linguistic order language remained unchanged in its power to guarantee human identity and value. His highly idiosyncratic and unstable blending of Romantic idealism, linguistics, religious humanism, and pulpit oratory, however, ultimately assured his failure as a linguistic scientist.