National Poet Research Articles

Material Origin in Folklore Texts of Predominantly Historical Themes

The article deals with the issues of architectonics of folklore texts of historical content: Russian and Ukrainian historical songs, historical ballads, dooms and epics. The relevance of the study is due to the search for a synchronous typological similarity between folklore texts of different ethnic, generic, genre, and poetic nature. Special attention is paid to three aspects of the organization of the song plot: its compositional layering, the combination of several principles in it; the plot meaning of allomotives, explicating the material principle; their styling. The definitions of the material and spiritual principles are given. The objective existence of typological similarities at the level of the allomotive organization of Russian and Ukrainian texts related to the classical, traditional and stage-by-stage types of creativity in the field of historical song folklore is shown. It is shown that this similarity can be explained by the reflection in the texts of vital, everyday empiricism and can acquire different stylistic incarnations: reduced everyday, ascertaining, idealizing. The question is raised about the reasons for the axiological differences in the Russian and Ukrainian folklore traditions. It is proved that the explication of the material principle can have different meanings in the organization of the song plot: optional, meaningful within a fragment of the text, plot-forming.

The Relationship Between Man And Nature Is A Ruling Theme In Robert Frost Poems

Robert Frost is a nature poet. He is a world of towering mountains and curving valleys, dense woods and leaf strewn road. Season follows season. Trees shed their leaves in autumn. Snow falls fast and flakes piles deep everywhere in winter. Flowers blossom and melted snow boils in creeks and rivers in spring. The summer sum stimulates blueberry buds. Day follows night and night follows day. The sun shines and the stars glitter. In frost’s poetry nature is all pervasive, touching man’s life at every point. The relationship between man and nature is a ruling theme with Frost. Frost’s views on the relationship between man and nature are ambivalent. Man is nature’s preservers as well as destroyer. On the one hand, man and nature exist together, close to each other; on the other, they exist in different realms, remote from each other. Some poems reveal that nature is beneficent to man while others point out that it is indifferent and maleficent. At times man covers under the tyranny of nature, terrified; at others, he contends against it courageously and tries even to master it. Some of his persons look upon nature as a source of revelation while other reject this view and believe that nature has nothing to reveal. The actions of man toward nature are double-edged. As the preserver of nature, man assumes the stewardship; of his environment. As the destroyer of nature he plunders it.

The Relationship Between Man And Nature Is A Ruling Theme In Robert Frost Poems

Robert Frost is a nature poet. He is a world of towering mountains and curving valleys, dense woods and leaf-strewn road. Season follows season. Trees shed their leaves in autumn. Snow falls fast and flakes piles deep everywhere in winter. Flowers blossom and melted snow boils in creeks and rivers in spring. The summer sum stimulates blueberry buds. Day follows night and night follows day. The sun shines and the stars glitter. In frost’s poetry nature is all pervasive, touching man’s life at every point. The relationship between man and nature is a ruling theme with Frost. Frost’s views on the relationship between man and nature are ambivalent. Man is nature’s preservers as well as destroyer. On the one hand, man and nature exist together, close to each other; on the other, they exist in different realms, remote from each other. Some poems reveal that nature is beneficent to man while others point out that it is indifferent and maleficent. At times man covers under the tyranny of nature, terrified; at others, he contends against it courageously and tries even to master it. Some of his persons look upon nature as a source of revelation while other reject this view and believe that nature has nothing to reveal. The actions of man toward nature are double-edged. As the preserver of nature, man assumes the stewardship; of his environment. As the destroyer of nature he plunders it.

The Collaborative Folktale Project of a Family: The Synoptic Critical Edition of a 19th-Century Hungarian Folktale and Riddle Collection

AbstractIn 1862, a volume of tales was published under the title Eredeti népmesék (‘Original Folktales’) by László Arany, the then 18-year-old son of János Arany, the national poet of the period. Eredeti népmesék has been classified by folkloristics as the first canonical folktale collection in Hungary. Besides scholarly recognition, it has also become one of the most popular folktale collections of the past one and a half century, as selected tales from this collection have been continuously republished in schoolbooks and anthologies and have become a regular element in children's literature. After the Second World War, in the basement of the main building of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, a huge pile of manuscripts had been found in very poor condition, consisting of, among others, various 19th-century folklore collections. In the 1960s, it was discovered that a part of these manuscripts was identical to the texts published in Eredeti népmesék. The vast majority of the manuscript tales had been recorded by the family members of János Arany, namely, his young daughter (Julianna Arany) and his wife (Julianna Ercsey), in the period between 1850 and 1862, presumably for family use. A comparison of the manuscript texts with their published versions revealed that in the editing process, László Arany significantly reworked the texts of the manuscript tales, implementing significant stylistic modifications. This article reports on the research project underlying the synoptic critical edition of the manuscript and published tales of the Arany family (2018). In the first part, the author presents the manuscript and published tales and their place in the history of Hungarian folkloristics, followed by an introduction of the members of the Arany family with an emphasis on their socio-cultural background, and concluding with a discussion of the roles they played in this collaborative folktale project as collectors, editors, copy editors, and theoreticians. The second part is a summary of the textological concept and techniques applied in the course of the development of the synoptic critical edition.

“HƏR OXUYAN MOLLA, PƏNAH OLMAZ!”

The strength of poetry by Mollah Panah Vagif is not only for the closeness to the people, or for nationality and the sweetness of language style, but also for universal characteristic features. Mollah Panah Vagif is one of the outstanding persons who has great value both in his living period, next centuries and nowadays too. His literary works are not only the beginning of Renaissance period of our national poetry, but also founded the basis of new literary school having a talent of showing reality. Mollah Panah Vagif's literary works play a lighthouse role for his followers. This literary school was the realism of our national-people poetry. This reality is our today's victory for our motherland. When we watch Mollah Panah Vagif's literary works through the mirror of XXI century, we can see that he has been risen to the peak of modernity of poetic talent. The main fact of this peak is Vagif's realism, his universal feelings, his accuracy and being laconic. Reflecting deep meanings with few words by poet is the basis of this work. That is the obvious example of the poet's high talent. Key words: each reader, mollah, Panah, Vagif, national poet, people, Shushah, Saatli estates, Ibrahimkhalil khan, Musah Kalimullah, Ali Galibari, Turan world

How to Become an Author: The Poet Isa Asp and Her Childhood Fascination with Writing for Magazines

In this article the author explores the early development of the identity as a writer of a Finnish-speaking poet Lovisa (or Isa) Asp (1853–1872). She wrote her lyrics in the Finnish language in the 1870s, and she is regarded as the first 19th-century female Finnish poet (whose works were published in Finnish). She began writing poetry (initially in Swedish) as a teenager and started her literary career as a contributor to children’s magazines. Asp began her studies at the Teacher Training College in Jyväskylä in autumn 1871 with the aim of working as an elementary school teacher, but she also dreamt of becoming an established writer someday. Unfortunately, her early death meant that most of her poetry remained unpublished until the 21st century.
 The author investigates what kind of literature Asp read and why she was able to read extensively as a child in the remote Finnish-speaking countryside at a time when Finnish-language literature for children was scarce and still only nascent and being developed for nationalistic reasons; in those decades, most of the books and publications were still written in Swedish. The author analyses in particular the gendered experiences of reading (and writing) in the life of a young girl and woman from the countryside, because in those days most of the authors were men living in towns. A special focus of the article is on the texts that she wrote and edited for children’s magazines. The author studies her autobiographical sources using a biographical method and considers what kind of literature and libraries inspired her career as an early female poet.
 National poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg and poet and historian Zacharias Topelius, the major Fennoman authors, were the literary models for the young Isa Asp. Their works inspired her to write and to aspire for a career as a poet and author, an occupation that was then still rare for a woman. Writing for children’s magazines was a crucial stage in her career, and her identity as a writer was strengthened by the opportunity to have her poems and short tales published. Also, writing for these handwritten as well as published magazines made her dreams visible and encouraged her to pursue them with effort. All this shows that her development as a writer was a deliberate, goal-oriented process. The publication of her poems and obtaining the community’s approval of them were important for the young poet. The encouragement to pursue a career in writing that Isa with her literary gifts received as a child from her immediate surroundings helped her to achieve her dreams, which in the end turned out not to be impossible to realise.

Traces of Mysticism in Wordsworth’s Aesthetics of Nature: A Study on William Wordsworth’s Nature Philosophy in the Light of Ibn Al-‘Arabi’s Ontology

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is generally known as a nature poet or a “worshipper of nature”. Yet, his nature poems are not merely confined to the portrayal of the physical elements of nature but are marked by his enlightened spiritual vision. The belief in one life flowing through all, which is a prominent feature of Wordsworth’s nature poetry is a prevalent theme also in the treatment of man and the universe in Ibn al-‘Arabi’s philosophy_ a Sufi mystic whose philosophy is most famously associated with the doctrine of wahdat al-wujud or “the oneness of being”. This paper is an attempt to critically analyze the traces of pantheistic and mystical elements underlying Wordsworth’s poetry, and more importantly compare this with Ibn al-‘Arabi’s stand on the matter. Through analysis of Ibn al-‘Arabi’s ontology, particularly his concept of unity of being and his emphasis on the importance of the faculty of imagination, this study first meets the controversy surrounding the pantheistic elements in Wordsworth’s nature philosophy and then attempts to demonstrate that the mystical doctrine of unity in all beings and the reliance on intuition and imagination as a means of perception of divine immanence is evident in both Ibn al-‘Arabi’s ontology and Wordsworth’s nature poetry. This study also reveals that Wordsworth’s attempt to get to coalescence of subject and object via imagination and its sublime product, poetic language, resembles the mystic’s yearning for transcendental states of consciousness and unification with the divine.

„Familien-Denkmal“ vs. „National Eigenthum“

Abstract Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s personal library was a prime source of his literary and scientific writings, but has nonetheless found little attention in research. This study explains this disregard by examining the library as both “familial inheritance” (Erbe) and “cultural heritage” (Kulturerbe), two conflicting concepts that, nonetheless, both resulted in the monumentalization of the writer’s book collection. By turning Goethe’s library into a monument, the individual, telling histories of the books he owned, has often been overshadowed. Many books are associated with multiple owners and have gone through the hands of Goethe’s family, friends, and assistants. Against this background, provenance research allows us to gain new insights into Goethe’s works, reading and writing practices, as well as his stylization as a German national poet.

Reflection on the Significance of Kristijonas Donelaitis and His Works in the Lithuanian Press. Efforts to Commemorate Poet's 200th Birth Anniversary

On the eve of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Kristijonas Donelaitis (January 1, 1914), in Lithuania ruled by the Russian Empire, the press of the National Democrats and Liberal Democrats covered the efforts to erect a monument in honor of the poet (the idea arose in Lithuania Minor). It criticized the work of the committee that was in charge of the initiative, which was led by conservatives. The Catholic press was very reserved in its coverage of the initiatives of the memorial. The confessional aspect of the imagined Lithuanian national identity also hindered the involvement in a project that would unite the entire nation. In Russian-administered Lithuania, the emphasis was more on publications introducing Donelaitis’s personality and works. In the beginning of 1914, Kristijonas Duonelaitis’s Writings compiled by Jurgis Šlapelis was published in Vilnius; however, no public organization or institution sponsored the book. The difficulties in organizing activities to commemorate Donelaitis experienced by the Lithuanian Scientific Society testify to the fact that the poet had not yet been perceived as a national poet in Lithuania, and that there was a lack of coordinated work. In Russian ruled Lithuania, the articles and papers about Donelaitis by Juozas Gabrys Paršaitis, Mykolas Biržiška, Petras Leonas, Ignas Jurkūnas-Seinius, and Pranas Dovydaitis were overdue.With the outbreak of the war, the ambitions of the Catholic press to introduce the legacy of Donelaitis began to emerge. Some of the texts were used during the World War I for the purpose of Lithuanian cultural education. The studies of Gabrys-Paršaitis and Biržiška became an important part of the first literature textbooks of the Republic of Lithuania.

Художественное своеобразие пьесы Расула Гамзатова «Горянка»

The article considers artistic originality of the play “The Mountain Girl” by the national poet of Dagestan Rasul Gamzatov. The study aims to reveal originality of characters and circumstances, various types of conflicts: domestic, interfamilial, interpersonal, psychological. The play tells the story of a young mountain woman in a realistic manner. Entering into a conflict with the world dominated by centuries-old conservative traditions and practices, the young woman emerges victorious from this unequal struggle. Scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that it expands understanding of R. Gamzatov’s multi-genre creative work, in particular, the famous poet is portrayed as a talented dramatist, he is skilful in creating psychological portraits, depicting people’s characters and relationships, penetrating into their inner world. The attained results have shown the nature of the artistic and aesthetic richness and depictive potential of the play “The Mountain Girl”, shed light on peculiarities of the conflict and character, as well as on the author’s individual artistic style.

TÂM CỦA NGUYỄN DU TỪ THƠ CHỮ HÁN ĐẾN VĂN CHIÊU HỒN

From Chinese poetry, “The Tale of Kieu” to “Van chieu hon” shows a movement in Nguyen Du’s thought. The mind of Nguyen Du moved from the heart of a Confucian, in which Chinese poetry expressed life’s pains and sorrows, to the immense compassionate heart of Buddhism for sentient beings in “Van chieu hon” This article highlights that movement. At the same time, it is clear that, whether from the mind of the scholar Nguyen Du, or the mind of the Buddhist disciple Nguyen Du, the movement in Nguyen Du’s thought is also derived from a kind heart: a "thinking heart for a thousand years" of the great Vietnamese national poet.

Poetic effects and visuospatial form: A relevance-theoretic perspective

This article examines the potential cognitive-pragmatic effects of line divisions within poetic text from the perspective of relevance theory. The article posits that line divisions can function as perceptual inputs to pragmatic processing, which encourage readers to inferentially process certain elements of a given poetic text's linguistically encoded content in a more contextually exhaustive manner, than likely would have been the case had the text been arranged upon the page in a less visuospatially fragmented form. The article contends that such levels of processing may give rise to arrays of additional cognitive-pragmatic effects of a communicatively weak and for some readers poetic nature.

Concord between Palestinian Resistance and Literature: A Historico-Literary Analysis of Darwish’s Works

This research explores the last seventy years of the Palestinian Arabs’ political struggle for their recognition as a sovereign nation-state as reflected in the poetic and prose works of Palestinian national poet, Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008). Given the relationship between life and literature, the Palestinian situation can be best revealed through their own cultural productions, especially literature. Darwish has utilized his sense of exile and cultural memory to realize the ideals of Palestinian home and its requisite identity. His writings constitute an integral part of Palestinian resistance literature. His works are reflective of a deep aesthetic sense coupled with a profound political understanding of the ground facts within and outside Palestine. He contests the legitimacy of a sustained foreign occupation and at the same time stresses the need of preserving national cultural heritage. He stresses the need of both intellectual and political resistance to the gradual encroachment caused by the colonial settlement regime. The present research has sought to figure out the dimensions of Darwish’s poetic and intellectual contribution to the volatile geopolitical issue of the resistance to a hegemonic control.

«Новые лирические исследования» XXI века: эстетическое и социальное в поэтической критике

The article considers the problem of correlation of aesthetic form and social content in contemporary poetry through the prism of contemporary poetry criticism, in particular, the New Lyric Studies of 2008 (M. Perloff, Y. Prins, R. Terada, V. Jackson, etc.). A representation of the lyrics as a genre of poetry, in which historically structured subjectivism and identity of author are interrelated with poetic writing, is at the center of the New Lyric Studies. In this context the lyrics is relative and volatile but also is the closest genre to the poetic nature, that allows to merge an autonomous entity of poetry with ‘agendas’ in the poem, which were difficult to connect in either too formal or too contextual critical approaches to the poetry in the 20th century. This became possible in the conditions of New Lyric critics speaking up against a substitution of poetry and literary criticism for historical, anthropological and cultural criticism because of the high popularity of cultural studies in the 1990s and the ensuing incorporation of interdisciplinarity in literary studies. Despite the objective of New Lyric critics to revitalize a theoretical study of poetry in the spirit of academic criticism of the New Criticism, the modifications in the methods for producing, existence and broadcasting of poetry and therefore in poetry of the last 50 years, poetry itself prevented the New Lyric from becoming the regressive movement. Some representatives of the New Lyric Studies subsequently expressed the need to study poetry in terms of new historical poetics and to create different methods capable to analyze the relations between culture and poetic form – between the social and the aesthetic. Having considered advantages and limitations of the New Lyric studies in the context of contemporary poetry discourse, reflecting not only the nature of contemporary criticism, but also perhaps the history of poetry criticism of 20-21th centuries, which is the dynamical coexistence and the mutual succession of different movements, the author draws a conclusion that this movement defines the right vector for the reconciliation of the long-standing struggle of formalism and contextualism in the poetry criticism as well as social and aesthetic components which poetic work includes.

Yakub Kolas and Kazakh literature

The article examines the connections between the classic of Belarusian literature Yakub Kolas and some Kazakh writers. These connections are traced with the help of the collection materials of the State Literary and Memorial Museum of Yakub Kolas, and the creative activity and life paths of Belarusian and Kazakh writers are also analyzed. The acquaintance of Yakub Kolas with the classics of Kazakh literature Sabit Mukanov and Mukhtar Auezov is described in detail, and their creative paths and significance for their peoples are compared. Attention is especially focused on the similarity of social and political activities and literary creativity (military poems, autobiographical novels) by Sabit Mukanov and Yakub Kolas. Possible ways of developing cooperation between museums established in honor of Kazakh writers and the literary museum of the classic of Belarusian literature are noted.The connection with Kazakhstan of the national poet of Belarus during the Great Patriotic War is also not overlooked, as are the translations of the works of Yakub Kolas into the Kazakh language. The material also contains an attempt to analyze the degree of popularity of the Belarusian classic Yakub Kolas among the Kazakh creative intelligentsia. It can be assumed that the congratulatory address and personal gifts from Kazakh writers are evidence of the recognition, respect and certain fame of Yakub Kolas in the spaces of the Kazakh steppe.

An Analysis on The Daffodils and Wordsworth’s Romantic View of Nature

Wordsworth is the leading figure of English Romanticism in the 19th century and the most famous poet among the “Lake Poets”. He ushers in a new era of Romanticism for the English literature, and also exerts a great influence on the world literature. Most of his poems are about the natural scenery from which he explores its impact on human’s soul, so he has been regarded as “a poet of nature”. This thesis reveals the formation of the poet’s romantic view of nature and its demonstrations by analyzing one of his famous poems The Daffodils.

Yehuda Amichai, the Unlikely National Poet

Yehuda Amichai, the Unlikely National Poet

Demand of the Centuries

Demand of the Centuries Pedro Mir (bio) Translated from Spanish by Jonathan Cohen Keywords Pedro, Mir, Jonathan, Cohen, Dominican poets, Sylph, geography, nautical Wild and splendid Sylphyou absolute animal,open your two waysof glidingon a tangent of the planetand show me how to make people.To turn peninsulas into faces,archipelagos into sailors,into magical horizonsyour circular mannerof gliding.Open your two scaleslike the pages of a bookthat shows how to make peopleand show me how to forma small fleshnose, skin for some bones,for a smile with the touchof a little blue whereyour outermost and softesttendon endsto make me absolutely an animal,an absolute wild animalthat lives forever. [End Page 246] Pedro Mir pedro mir (1913–2000) was the Dominican Republic's foremost poet of the twentieth century, named the country's Poeta Nacional (National Poet, i.e., Poet Laureate) by the Dominican Congress in the 1980s. He continues to hold this high poetic status. "Demand of the Centuries" comes from his 1969 book of erotic love poetry Poemas de buen amor … y a veces de fantasía (Poems of Good Love … and Sometimes Fantasy). He believed the ultimate aim of love is not poetry but the procreation of human beings. Though not well known in the United States, he is in the same league of Latin American poets as his contemporary Pablo Neruda. Jonathan Cohen jonathan cohen is a poet, translator, essayist, and scholar. He translated Pedro Mir's Two Elegies of Hope (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and, with Donald D. Walsh, Countersong to Walt Whitman and Other Poems (Peepal Tree Press, 2018). He is editor of William Carlos Williams's By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916–1959 (2011) and the centennial edition of Williams's Al Que Quiere! (both published by New Directions, 2017). His edition of Williams's translation of the Spanish Golden Age novella The Dog and the Fever, by Pedro Espinosa, was published in 2018 by Wesleyan University Press. Copyright © 2021 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

Graphic “Diaries” by Victor Zamirailo in the context of poetics of the symbolist artist`s work

The paper aims to analyze the creative “laboratory” of a talented symbolist artist Viktor Dmitrievich Zamirailo, whose art is associated with the development of original features of Russian modernism. Due to the tragic circumstances caused by Soviet ideology, as well as the irrational nature of poetics of the master’s work, Zamirailo’s legacy is poorly studied, but extremely rich in literary and philosophical associations, at the turn of the 20th century. His imaginative world, full of chivalry dreaminess, allows revealing internal (spiritual) sources of the formation of an idealistic system of symbolist thinking, which found its original reflection in the works of such aesthetically close to Zamirailo contemporaries as M. A. Vrubel, A. N. Benoit et al. The paper focuses on the albums with sketches by the master from the collection of the State Russian Museum, unique in their creative potential, for the first time analyzed by the author. Albums allow us to comprehend the individual logic of the Zamirailo iconographic system, as well as to understand the general laws of the fantasy of imaginative illusions of symbolist artists.

Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe by George Santayana

Reviewed by: Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe by George Santayana Daniel DiMassa George Santayana. Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Coedited by Kellie Dawson and David E. Spiech. Introduced by James Seaton. Cambridge: MIT, 2019. xxxvi + 239 pp. Why might anyone turn now, more than a century after its publication, to Santayana's Three Philosophical Poets (1910)? Reading Santayana's essay is a bit like reading Erich Auerbach. It attunes one to concerns that, though fixed firmly in the field of philology, quite clearly hover in the spheres of philosophy. As with Auerbach, Santayana's preoccupations with nature and history result in an essay of daunting intellectual sweep and grand pretension: he aims to sketch—using the examples of Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe—tectonic shifts in the history of philosophy. The essay, unfortunately, only recommends Santayana as a poor man's Auerbach. Driven by his commitment to naturalism, the history he traces is clichéd and undifferentiated. His insights are rarely original or even interesting. Whereas Auerbach could take up Dante and make a case for him as the first "poet of the secular world," Santayana—in a tired recapitulation of rationalist readings—views him as a talent despite his age, a supernaturalist who peddles a "mirage" while neglecting the evidence of nature. This, despite the fact that Santayana, in a significant anticipation of Auerbach's key arguments, regards Dante's afterlife as a "fulfillment" of an individual's life on earth (as opposed to a punishment or reward). Santayana's affections lie with Lucretius and Goethe, the two naturalists among the three poets. But here, too, certain clichés govern the lines of his inquiry: Goethe, whom he writes about with reference only to Faust, is above all the poet of "Romantic immediacy," in Santayana's view, and no poet of special philosophical or scientific competence. To get at the philosophical dynamics at play in Faust, Santayana leans on Spinoza, which is helpful, save for the degree to which it shunts from view any other portions of Goethe's philosophical diet. Santayana treats Goethe's Romanticism as a historical affair, but ironically, we find in Santayana himself the traces of a lingering Romanticism. He may have been unaware of it, but his conjunction of precisely these three poets was an unusually Romantic gesture. Around 1800, Goethe and Schelling had planned a didactic poem of nature in the style of Lucretius's De rerum natura; when Goethe relinquished the project, Schelling planned to complete the poem in the style of Dante's Commedia. At the same time, Friedrich Schlegel, in his essay on changes in Goethe's poetic style, conceived of the Olympian in Weimar as a new Dante. Santayana's history of poetic philosophers, in other words, emerges from a peculiarly Romantic history of poetry. But whereas Romantics like Schelling and Schlegel located affinities across these texts, Santayana finds, by and large, differences. He is keen to summarize them as such: "Goethe is the poet of life; Lucretius the poet of nature; Dante the poet of salvation." In their differences they complement and complete each other; what conjoins the three poets, according to Santayana, is their status as representatives of a historical age. Perhaps it is that status, widely intuited as such, that has led many self-professed "amateurs" to write about Dante and Goethe. Indeed, these sorts of texts may amount to a semischolarly genre unto itself, with predictably mixed results. Santayana's essay announces itself as the "impressions of an amateur," and Vittorio Hösle, citing Santayana, has defended his own "amateur" contributions to the scholarship of Dante and Goethe. But Hösle and other scholars of diverse backgrounds, e.g., Josef Pieper, have rendered meaningful contributions to the knowledge of such poets and their texts. I am not convinced Santayana has. But, to be [End Page 373] clear, if Santayana's text is imperfect, it is rhetorically magnificent in its imperfection and, as such, a useful foil for budding scholars. The section on Goethe's Faust, for example, could easily serve as a usefully problematic commentary in an undergraduate seminar on Goethe. For the professor who wishes her students to see Goethe's...