Hrabanus Maurus’s ninth-century Excerptio de arte grammatica Prisciani is a compendium of prosodic rules intended for classroom use as an aid to the scansion and composition of metrical poetry, a hard-learned skill in the Early Middle Ages, when syllable lengths had disappeared from spoken Latin. The work is best understood as a creative synthesis of several Late Antique and Early Medieval grammatical works, mainly those of Donatus and Priscian. In addition, Hrabanus’s presentation of common syllables (syllables that can be interpreted as either long or short) relies heavily on Bede’s eighth-century De arte metrica, and, in many places, quotes it verbatim.

In his highly polemical De arte metrica, Bede sought to create a standard for purely Christian verse, replacing Vergil and the “pagan” classics with Christian epic poets as a normative model, even in questions of prosody. In Hrabanus’s paraphrase, however, Bede’s strongly pro-Christian sentiment has been moderated to a high degree. Bede’s condemnation of “pagan” prosodic license is presented in a considerable less severe form, and Hrabanus has re-introduced quotations from pre-Christian poets into his presentation, including the verse of Horace, which had enjoyed a renaissance in the Carolingian age. While Hrabanus does not directly challenge Bede’s dichotomy of pagan and Christian verse technique, he has sought to find a compromise between the Bedan norm and the Carolingians’ new-found interest in the classical tradition in order to meet the demands of his audience.

Hospitality aims at securing communal harmony against the potential disruptions caused by the arrival of strangers. Arguably the bedrock of social interaction, it testifies to the idea a community has of itself. Yet in practice hospitality is closely related to hostility, as the presence of strangers reveals, tests, and possibly upsets social order. This article focuses on Beowulf and examines hospitality as a public performance entailing the display of overt gestures. Arguing that with its eponymous hero, Beowulf offers an idealized model of behavior whose appeal resides in his ability to establish lasting peace, it contrasts Beowulf’s successful visit to Hrothgar’s court with recurring instances of failed hospitality (as seen in the Finnsburh episode, Heardred’s death, or the marriage between Ingeld and Freawaru).

Evidence in manuscript copies of the medieval fable collection, the elegiac Romulus, indicate that aside from the traditional moral at the end of the fable, there were also moral lessons contained in the middle of fable. The significance of these internal morals can be seen particularly clearly in the work of fifteenth century fabulist, Robert Henryson. Rather than furthering these moral lessons, however, Henryson’s collection departs from the traditions of the genre in ways that are both imaginative and highly critical. Henryson depends on his reader’s knowledge of other fable collections, and uses this assumption of knowledge to teach the reader a new form of understanding the popular genre. Throughout his collection, Henryson works to change his reader’s view of the virtues of moral behavior by forcing them to critique the very genre he is writing in.

This article traces the political uses of Milton’s favorite scriptural narrative, the parable of the talents, in his writings during the English Revolution. The parable served as a rhetorical commonplace for Milton, the Smectymnuans, and others advocating reforms in church government, and from the pulpit to the pamphlet, “talents” signified England’s opportunities for religious change. I show how in The Reason of Church-Government, Milton reinvents the parable to describe England’s struggle as an end-time conflict, in which everyone must employ his or her talents before ultimate reckoning with God. Sonnet 19 “When I consider how my light is spent” also examines English identity in light of the Second Coming. I offer a new and non-biographical interpretation, in which England—having run out of “light” and time—is in danger of becoming the parable’s wicked servant. In conclusion, I show how the politicization of the parable is a fresh lens through which to understand Milton’s works, the religious climate of the Revolution, and the complex relationship between poetry and polemic.

This essay offers a comparative reading of Defoe’s, Addison’s and Philips’s poems on the English victory at Blenheim, with a particular focus on the way in which the three poets adhered to established critical definitions of politeness. In the process, the discussion suggests that Defoe’s A Hymn to Victory is an important early contribution to the mass of Blenheim panegyrics, since it represents an ideological and aesthetic middle ground between the two poles represented by the Whiggish The Campaign and the Tory-inflected Bleinheim.

Since Wordsworth was seen by T. S. Eliot both as a fellow revolutionary and as a cultural adversary, he supplies a particularly rich illustration of Eliot’s contention that the significance of a poem depends on an appreciation of its relation to the great poetry of the past. The Dry Salvages is the poem through which Eliot engages most fully with Romanticism, and it represents, as has long been recognized, his closest approach to the loco-descriptive poem of that movement. Comparison of the many specific motifs that the poem shares with The Prelude allows for a close textured account of the immediate poetic implications of the two writers’ diverging views on the role of the poet, on primitivism, on the rival metaphysics of immanence and transcendence, and on the relative importance of individual and collective identity. The two poems abound in passages sufficiently affined to reveal the differing aims and achievements of each.

While an undergraduate at Iowa in the fall of 1937, Thomas Lanier [Tennessee] Williams III authored “Stranger in Yellow Gloves,” a prose poem about a young man’s obsession with another man’s wife-to-be. Wavering between heterosexual erotics and social criticism, the poem turns from being a troubled paean to heterosexuality into a romantic denunciation of ostentatious wealth, a theme that preoccupied the writer throughout his life. Ostensibly a fictive piece influenced by real life events – here, his first and last heterosexual encounter with the young coed Elizabeth Mary “Bette” Rietz, whom he calls “Sally” in the Memoirs – “Stranger in Yellow Gloves” is an example of Williams on the cusp of a divided self that, within a year, would sacrifice the heterosexual Tom to save the gay Tennessee.

The idea of “poetic feet,” investigated by medieval writers on the arts of versification and played with by poets, links language at its loftiest to the lowest part of the body. The phrase suggests that poetry, rather than inviting discerning readers to move past the carnal letter and toward a spiritual meaning, endeavors to take on its own flesh. This essay considers how poets’ self-conscious acknowledgement of the prosodic term might relate to incarnational desire and the wish to resurrect figures of poetic inheritance. It also examines how travel narrative, its routes marked out and commemorated by footprints, offers a figure for narrative itself. Looking at a number of prose texts and poetry – accounts of Mandeville’s travels, Dante’s Inferno, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – the essay considers the meanings wrapped up in the fleshly foot, the footprint, and the poetic foot as they variously intersect, and as they take up the work of narrative first begun by footfall, out of the garden and into a world of language.

For over a century Havelok the Dane (c. 1285) scholarship has scrutinized ‘inconsistencies’ such as Grim’s executioner/nurturer switch, Ubbe’s menacing/devoted change, and the sixty sergeants who seemingly become attackers, usually recapitulating the easy conclusion of garbled sources. Two recent readings are potentially more fertile, the interest in MS Laud 108’s hagiographic-romance tropes, and oral-folktale analyses which stress Havelok’s vulnerability and scenic sentimentality. These two approaches may help animate a new poetic conceit where Havelok exerts a redemptive ‘pull’ on other characters via his inherent moral and noble virtue; in effect the kynemark and flame function as dramatic signs betokening character ameliorations already in progress. Tracing in narrative time how others morally improve by proximity to Havelok’s sanctity may help resolve the claimed discrepancies, in addition to illuminating the themes and techniques of the poem.

This essay examines a lost epic poem by Alexander Pope: Alcander, Prince of Rhodes. Between 1701 and 1703 Pope wrote four-thousand lines of this epic poem, and later shared the manuscript with trusted friends. Yet, upon the advice of Francis Atterbury, Pope burned the only text of Alcander in early 1717. Working from surviving fragments of the text and anecdotes about its content, this essay argues that Pope’s juvenile poem was significantly Jacobite in both content and topical implication, and that Pope burned the manuscript because he feared it might be discovered by the Hanoverian authorities. As such, Alcander demonstrates that Pope was working in a political idiom from the earliest stages of his poetical career.

The idea of the scene, and the making of a scene, recurs in both Henry James’s critical and autobiographical writing. The short story, “Nona Vincent,” concerns the professional staging of a play by a young writer inspired by an older woman. This essay considers the scene in its formal, theatrical – as well as its improvisatory – condition, while discussing the staging of a newly-written play, the problems and circumstantial details of dramatic production, the thematics of the play as textual authority, and the unpredictable nature of performance. The story’s comparative silence concerning the play’s content is foreshadowed in the incomplete and perhaps irretrievable scenes of James’s childhood theatricals, but the conditions of its inspiration and the demands of its central role, the exposure of the playwright to his theater public, constitute a parallel, alternative drama.

In Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939), the prevalence of the gestating female body provides an overt correlation between the status of the “othered” outsider figure and the status of the gestating heroine. Both Anna and Sasha, respectively, are at the mercy of their bodies as joint pregnant and colonial women haunting the streets of the metropole. In these two novels, the colonial condition is the condition of pregnancy and of modernism, as all yield changeability, dismantling of self, ostracization, fragmentation, and outsiderness. What is most important to any conception of these novels, I suggest, is a reconsideration of the centrality of the pregnancies both heroines experience. Pregnancy in these novels is a crucial modality of the colonial condition, I claim, and is therefore the prevailing mode of meaning-making for these heroines (and for Rhys) as they attempt to navigate the fragmented modernist landscape.

This essay places the legend of Richard III’s natal teeth within the frameworks of late medieval practices of historiography, folklore, and popular romance. While the myth of Richard III’s monstrous birth and natal teeth first appear within five years after the historical king’s death in 1485, the motifs therein are significantly older. The common take on this legend is that it originates in the work of authors whose motives are to demonize the character of Richard III and whose accounts can thus be considered unreliable. However, examining the legend within the above contexts reveals that the appearance of this motif speaks to a crossroads of folklore and medieval popular culture within changing conventions of late medieval historiography.

In response to a recent article in which conscience is said to communicate itself so equivocally in Macbeth as to fail to produce “a coherent other as witness,” this essay contends that conscience not only bears witness in Macbeth but is seen to do so in the confessional repentance it subsequently effects. Taking as its point of departure Macbeth’s famous act 1, scene 7 soliloquy in which explicit reference to the Christian eschatology of judgment, angels, trumpets, heaven, damnation, and “the life to come” attests to at least one unequivocal communication of conscience, the essay discloses three further ways in which Macbeth’s conscience bears witness: discursively in the form of internal dialogue masquerading as external dialogue; objectively in the figure of Banquo as Macbeth’s compunctious Other; and rhetorically through the metaphorical prick of conscience, writ large in the play’s dominant “dagger of the mind” conceit and, less conspicuously, in the verbal trope to stick.

In the early seventeenth century, several poets write on a specific romantic token, the gift of their lovers’ hair, which is to be worn around the wrist like a bracelet. That object’s ambiguity leads John Donne, Thomas Carew, and Thomas Stanley through poems that are forced to confront their own vulnerability to interpretation. The poets link the reading of the poem to the reading of the bracelets and question the power and meaning of each. Straddling two extremes, these pieces become exercises in excess; both hair and poem simultaneously promise the uncanny presence of the ostensibly absent and betray their own profligate or evacuated meaning. As such, they demonstrate both sacramental and excremental qualities. The reader’s role is equally dual. The writers at once have us engage with communities that transcend the ordinary limits of communication and also set us up to mistake—or even resist—meaning. As readers, our errors prove as integral as our attention as we set out to “correctly” understand these poems.

This article elucidates an underexamined aspect of English literary history: Wordsworth’s connection to the Chaucerian past. Wordsworth develops an intertextual relationship with his Medieval predecessor by engaging both Chaucer’s works themselves as well as their reception history. In the four hundred years following his death, Chaucer had been mediated by various layers of interpretation; in the Prelude, the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Wordsworth recalls and revises several of these interpretations to define his authorial identity as Chaucer’s poetic successor. The most important of his interlocutors is John Dryden, the Augustan claimant to the Chaucerian legacy, and a figure that Wordsworth finally positions as a discardable intermediary—a poet who provides the terms through which Wordsworth can construct a relationship with Chaucer, but who is himself excluded from this relationship.

A unique feature of Robert Fagles’s 1990 translation of Homer’s The Iliad is his strategic use of a phrase from W. B. Yeats’s poem, “Easter 1916,” in a passage that captures the essential values of the epic poem. Fagles’s choice to draw conspicuously on a phrase from a modern poem (“terrible beauty”) in his translation of an ancient one raises crucial issues relating to translation and intertextuality, foremost of which concerns translation as a process that is ultimately collaborative in nature. The translator, producing a “retranslation,” takes from the resources of his own modern poetic tradition, which has, in turn, been constructed out of the ancient tradition. Yeats’s poems, serving as the case in point, show a modernizing of Homer’s Helen, out of which a modern poetic idiom is constructed and subsequently used as material for a retranslation of Homer.