Teaching Of Latin Research Articles

An Interview with Nalo Hopkinson

HOPKINSON: My father was a writer, actor, and an English and Latin teacher. My mother worked in libraries most of my life, and still does. So basically my parents have influenced me by surrounding me with words and story. My brother Keita does the same. Visual art is his medium; he paints his stories. So he brings a painterly analysis to my work that I find really helpful, because it's such a different mode of seeing than a text-based one. Being surrounded with text and story and people who make text and story was like an informal apprenticeship. I could have learned how to string sentences together without school; I only needed to pull a book down off the bookshelves at home or attend a performance by my father or his peers. I suppose, one writes about one's surroundings. Anywhere I've lived, either in the tropics or in North America, it's been primarily in settings. I write about environments a lot, but what I find is that North American understanding of my work sometimes focuses on the tropical part of my experience to the exclusion of the urban part. Though when I write, I don't think, I'm going to reveal some significance about this setting. I just put the story in a cool place. For example, Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) literally begins on the corner of a street near where I used to live. I was walking home one night, passed a junkie in a doorway, and he mumbled at me, We have to get to know one another better, you know. That is one of the first lines in Brown Girl.

Comenius and Sweden, and Bengt Skytte's Sophopolis

In 1642 the Swedish government persuaded Comenius to come to Sweden in order to improve its educational system and, especially, to produce textbooks for the teaching of Latin. Comenius worked as an educational advisor to Sweden for six years. This paper describes his influence on and contact with the Swedish government and learned world and how his ideas of international cooperation and tolerance inspired men such as Bengt Skytte, who developed the idea of a 'Sophopolis', a centre or city of the learned and wise men drawn from many countries.

Il Glossario latino-inglese antico nel manoscritto di Anversa e Londra ed il Glossario di Ælfric: dipendenza diretta o derivazione comune?

There are common features of method in both glossaries, which borrow heavily from Isidore’s Etymologiae, but differences are also evident, due to the different use for which the two texts were intended. The compiler of the list now in the Antwerp-London manuscript tends to use rare or exotix lemmata, technical words especially of Greek origin: a lexicon reflecting the ornate insular diction known as “hermeneutic” Latin. A consequence of this particular lexical interest was the hapax-rich Anglo-Saxon vocabulary of the interpretamenta. The probable source-texts of the two glossaries can be related to the Latin teaching and writing tradition, as it was practiced at AEthelwold’s school at Abingdon and Winchester.

Klasikinių ir moderniųjų kalbų mokymo(si) teorijų metodologinės sąsajos

straipsnyje gvildenamos klasikinių kalbų mokymo(si) metodologinės problemos: apžvelgiama lotynų ir senosios graikų kalbų dėstymo patirtis, vertinamos Krasheno monitoriaus, lnterlanguage, kognityvioji svetimosios kalbos mokymosi teorijos, analizuojami šiuolaikinių mokslininkų darbai, akcentuojantys racionalų sąmoningo kalbų mokymosi ir dėstymo aktyvinimą. Keičiantis požiūriui į ugdymą ir ugdymąsi, siektina, kad tiek klasikinė lotynų, tiek senoji graikų kalbos taptų artimesnės jaunam žmogui, nes jos teikia specifinių asmenybės sklaidos galimybių. Racionalus šių kalbų mokymo(si) aktyvinimas sietinas su pozityviais svetimų kalbų mokymosi teorijų principais ir šiuolaikinėmis moderniųjų kalbų dėstymo tendencijomis.

The Devil’s Advocate: Baudelaire’s Cat as the Daîmon of Erotic Mysticism in Les Fleurs du mal

The cat is for Charles Baudelaire, the poet of Fleurs du mal, both sign and symbol. In Michael Riffaterre's analysis of the poem Les Chats, he isolates both meanings, the cat as the living sign of erotic relationship (Riffaterre 226) and the cat as the symbol of the poet's communion with the universe (Riffaterre 223). Between these erotic and mystical meanings lies the cat as daimon, that Greek concept of otherness that sometimes was portrayed as interpretive conscience, mediator acting as guardian according to Hesiod's Works and Days or sitting on one's shoulder visible only to those one encounters (Arendt 180). Baudelaire the poet has special daimonic vision insofar as the poet has insight into the daimon described by Hesiod as unseen by the one being influenced (Jaeger 52). The poet likewise literally sees the cat with its need to watch ... [and] demand to be watched (Riffaterre 227), thus leading the poet to be self-reflective as consequence of this communication with the daimon. The word daimon has also been confused historically with demon or devil and is thus linked with the evil that generates Baudelaire's vision for flowers or objects of beauty and delicacy. In post-Levinas world, we learn from Alain Finkielkraut that love is the basic model for ethical relationships le Mal procede d'abord d'une volonte de punir l'Autre de son intrusion dans mon existence (Finkielkraut 145). Hence, the poet looks for allies in this insight into the ethical consequences of Evil. The cat is such ally to be reckoned with in the quasi-religious rituals that are Baudelaire's poems. While Georges Bataille speaks, out of inspiration from Baudelaire, about the need for fundamental connection between religious ecstasy and eroticism (Bataille 1987 640), contemporary of T.S. Eliot, Arthur Symons, comments that Baudelaire's poetry is an eternal Mass served before altar (Eliot 1932 62). Baudelaire's poems indeed create the ambience for Catholic ritual, the Mass, as memento for Baudelaire from his father, Jean-Francois, who was defrocked priest (Pichois and Ziegler 50). The role model for moving the sacred to the profane was thus already set for Charles. Jean-Francois, the ordained priest, became teacher of Latin and Greek rhetoric. His son the poet was then sympathetic, almost symbiotically, with un pretre qui on arracherait sa divinite (OC (1) I 338). The poet conducts his poetic ritual before veiled altar, that is, one decorated as in Black Mass. This ritual does not invoke Romantic a symbol of revolt and heroic energy (Hyslop 80). Instead, the poet calls forth, as in his Les Litanies de Satan, what he would later call le plus parfait type de Beaute virile (Baudelaire 1949 22). This virility is in contradistinction with feminine wiles that threaten him because virilite de Baudelaire cherche se confondre avec la feminite (Bassim 12). Satan incarnates the poet's male sexuality, testosterone, driving the poet internally while eroticism leads the poet toward women who threaten him with emotional death and the chasm of self-destruction in his impotence (Antoine 97, n. 39) prior to being rejected by them. More than the Romantic myth, Baudelaire's Satan is the poet's salvation (Milner 10) as the artistic incarnation that the erotic drive leads to more. The poet has larger mystical vision wherein his personal chasm is matched by external abyss that promises escape in the company of others who are similarly rejected. This duality of chasms is developed by Pierre Guiraud as the opposition between gouffre marin and gouffre terrestre (Guiraud 1958 80 ff.) in Baudelaire's poetry. The unity of this opposition is also important to understand because the mystical vision of the poet seeks refuge in the encompassing beauty of poetic art. And there is the rub because Baudelaire's misogyny tells us that this is beaute malade(Anderson 27) and that we must search for the disorder of this sexual ideology in its apparent order. …

Navigating the Shoals: Teacher Training in our Graduate Programs

The impetus for the following four papers lies in several developments currently affecting the teaching of Classics in America. Each fall at Ph.D. granting institutions first year Classics teaching assistants stand before a class for the first time in their lives and do so with virtually no formal training in how to teach. Elsewhere, often in the same city or town, a pre-collegiate level Latin program is canceled for lack of a teacher or, almost as bad, is taught by a teacher with insufficient training in Latin. Frequently, and ironically, an extremely competent candidate with years of advanced Latin study applied for such a job but was rejected for not having certification or formal peda gogical training. These phenomena have for too long been seen as unrelated. Yet they are all related by the simple fact that each of us, school teacher and professor alike, spends a great deal of time teaching. A panel centering on the Latin teacher shortage (Disciplina abhorret vacuum: Addressing the Latin Teacher Short age) was therefore convened at the 2000 CAMWS meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee. Here, speakers from a range of instructional levels and institutions1 gathered to discuss the current crisis we face in providing teachers for our pre-collegiate Latin and Greek classrooms.

King Alfred's Preface and the Teaching of Latin in Anglo-Saxon England

King Alfred's educational programme, described in the prefatory letter to his translation of the Regula Pastoralis of Gregory the Great, has often been understood as enunciating a clear distinction between vernacular literacy for the laity and Latin literacy for the clergy, and as setting forth a programme for training in both. The note argues that contextual considerations make it unlikely that the king intended such a distinction between lay and clerical languages, and that the terminology of his preface does not support it. The primary focus of his programme was on vernacular literacy; the study of Latin was noted as a desideratum for those intended for higher rank, probably in church or state, but ignorance of Latin was a common phenomenon amongst the ordinary Anglo‐Saxon clergy, at all periods, and there is no evidence that Alfred had the resources to change this or the wish to do so.

“Esopo no fabulas”: More Notes on Aesop in Sixteenth-Century Japan

In the year 1592/3 a three-volume set of materials was printed at Amakusa, Japan, the second element of which wasEsohono Fabulas [‘he Fables of Aesop’, which survives as an unicum in the BL. This article first studies the sources for this book. There is a link with the Steinhöwel collection, but other possible sources are a late edition of the Martin Dorp collection, the collection by Joachim Camerarius, or the Romulus Roberti. Secondly, the history of the fables in Japanese is discussed. Originally they were probably meant for the teaching of Latin. Soon they were — in a more literary form — used to attract the attention of cultured Japanese people. This more literary version was the starting point of a purely Japanese tradition of fables and fable motifs.

Review Article: Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide. Ed. F.A.C. Mantello and A.G. Rigg

Review Article by Ralph Hexter Medieval Latin. An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide. Edited by F.A.C. Mantello and A.G. Rigg. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996. Pp. xiv, 774. The present volume represents a remarkable achievement and should be welcomed heartily by all students and teachers of Medieval Latin. Little of Martin McGuire's pathbreaking original Introduction to Medieval Latin Studies: A Syllabus and Bibliographical Guide (1964) or its revision by Hermigild Dressler (1977) remains except the identity of the press (Catholic University of America). Yet thanks in part to the generations of students and teachers who availed themselves of these somewhat homey concoctions, teaching and research in Medieval Latin are thriving in North America as perhaps never before, and the present volume pays a handsome tribute to McGuire and Dressler by rethinking the purpose of such a vade mecum at the tum of the millennium and giving us a greatly expanded and very professional handbook sans syllabus -how could there be one syllabus in any event?-based on the collaboration of a range of experts who as a group testify to the very health of Medieval Latin studies to which I just referred. The first section of the Introduction (A), Medieval Latin, Past and Present (A.AA-the work is divided into and cross-referenced by such alphabetic sections and subsections), concludes with recognition that while the world of Medieval Latin studies is international and polyglot and attained prestige as a university discipline at the end of the last century in Ludwig Traube's Munich, a North American blossoming of the field is clearly underway. Whether this is a real translatio studii or whether the decline perceived in some quarters in Munich is only relative (or attributable to other pressures on the German university system today), it might be interesting to interrogate why this is happening and what it means for medieval studies in North America. Does it reflect a serious revision of our culture's fixation on humanism and the elision of the medieval period, especially Medieval Latin, which dates from the Renaissance humanists themselves? Are students of Latin finally coming to their senses and realizing that there are

Antika kot likovna inspiracija

Tema tega razmišljanja, ki se je razvijala in oblikovala postopno, predvsem v zadnjih nekaj letih pripravljanja programov za pouk latinščine in likovne umetnosti na gimnaziji v hrvaškem Ivanić Gradu, je zrasla iz želje, da bi se mlademu človeku na zgoščen, a vendar dovolj pregleden in jasen način približalo bogastvo sveta antičnega človeka, kakor se kaže skozi stoletja razvoja evropske in delno tudi zunajevropske likovne umetnosti. Zato naj ne zamerijo tisti, ki so prepričani, da tema zahteva zgolj znanstveno obravnavo.

Pour une grammaire du discours : l'« ordre oratoire » face à la Praelectio, une occasion manquée

Alain Viala : For a speech grammar. The « oratory order » against the praelectio : a missed opportunity The « Français » still persists in treating the study of the language as a preliminary to the study of the texts (lot of grammar in primary school and Junior High School, lot of literature and no grammar in High School), especially by laying the emphasis on sentence's grammar. In reaction to its kicks, has appeared a text's grammar. But the language exists, in practice, as a speech, and is learned before school, and, more, the notion of « text » is problematical. The persistence of such an inadequate mechanism has historical reasons. In the middle of 18th Century, Batteux, by proposing to study the French authors aside of the Ancients, started a movement towards the « oratory order ». But the scholar institution didn't extend it, under the influence of the dominating model : the teaching of latin with a grammar of sentence — for a foreing language — and praelectio — for the literary texts. So there is an aggiornamento necessary and possible by the way of a "speech grammar"

What the tent maker's son taught me

In my search for a code by which to live, 1 turned my back on philosophers, and looked to the poets. At last I found what I had been looking for. One of my first favourites was Quinitus Horatius Flaccus, and I remember my old Latin teacher claiming that no-one could consider himself cultured unless he was familiar with Horace's ode on the fountain at Bandusia. Absolute nonsense, of course, Russian would have been far more useful at that time or Japanese today. However, we still had to learn it, and I can remember chunks to this day, together with the first lines of one of his greatest hits “Integer vitae”, which offers the advice that the upright man has no need of artifice, Moorish javelins &c. I actually enjoyed the meter and very condensed style of Horace, and my enjoyment increased even more when years later I learned that he had been a bit of a lad. At school, we had access only to the expurgated version of his work. However, I had still not found what I needed and decided to look elsewhere, turning my eyes to the East.

Studio e scuola in Arezzo durante il Medioevo e il Rinascimento. I documenti d'archivio fino al 1530 ed. by Robert Black

book reviews541 André Vauchez has vigorously pursued his scholarly agenda in the years following the publication of this book. He has not, however, significantly updated this particular work. Although it has appeared in two further French editions, they are essentially reprintings, with no changes to text or notes. This English translation is of the second edition, which dates to 1987 and has only a few pages of a cursory "bibliographic update." The student, therefore, should not rely on this translation as a guide to current scholarship, or even necessarily for bibliographic references, as many of the works cited in the notes have been since published in significantly different versions. It is also worth noting that much of Vauchez's own work has already appeared in English translation. An important sampling of his articles written between 1981 and 1987 may be found in The Laity in the MiddleAges:Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1993). Perhaps even more important for the Anglophone student of medieval Christianity is his brief,but brilliant overview of The Spirituality ofthe Medieval West: The Eighth to the Twelfth Century (Kalamazoo , Michigan, 1993), which was first published in 1975. (Unfortunately, the English translation necessarily lacks a wonderful chapter on the mendicants added to the second edition of 1994.) In any and all forms, André Vauchez is a scholar whose work is to be carefully considered and even treasured. Thomas Head Washington University Studio escuola inArezzo durante UMedioevo e il Rinascimento. I documenti d'archivio fino al 1530. A cura di Robert Black. (Arezzo: Accademia Petrarca di lettere arti e scienze. 1996. Pp. 873. Lire 150.000 paperback.) This is a collection of 1,284 documents and parts of documents dealing with education inArezzo, 1241 through 1530. Some 1,123 documents focus on preuniversity education; the rest detail Arezzo's failures to restore its university, which flourished in the early thirteenth century, then died. As Black informs the readers, he has not uncovered anything new of significance before 1384, but has found an abundance of new materials after that date. The documents come from three Aretine archives and the Archivio di Stato in Florence. Black summarizes the key points of the material in an historical survey of seventy-nine pages. Numerous documents deal with the two teachers paid by the communal goverment , the Latin or grammar master, who sometimes had an assistant, and the abbaco master, who taught commercial mathematics in the vernacular. Limited publicly-funded education was common in small Italian centers; Black has found little evidence of private teachers in Arezzo. Student fees supplemented the teachers' salaries. A document of i486 states that the Latin teacher had 120 students, which Black estimates to have been 25% of the masculine school-age population. Unfortunately, he offers no population figures to support the estimate . The abbaco teacher taught forty boys in 1471 and twenty-five in 1506, 542book reviews which was between 5% and 10% of the masculine school-age population, according to Black's estimate. Again supporting evidence is lacking. On the whole, the communal Latin and abbaco schools were successful and continuous. The university was neither. It probably was very small, perhaps eight professors in 1255, and seem to have died by the early fourteenth century. The government made several unsuccessful efforts to revive it in the next 200 years. AlthoughArezzo awarded some degrees, the university did not recover as a teaching institution for several reasons. The costs would have been higher than the Aretines were willing to bear. The ruling class never reached a consensus that a local university was needed. And Florence, which ruled Arezzo from 1384, did not grant permission for a university. When Lorenzo de' Medici signaled his intention of moving the University ofFlorence, the Aretines eagerly offered to be hosts. But it moved to Pisa in 1473. Beyond the individual documents, Black makes the case that Arezzo's strong tradition of Latin schooling nourished such important Aretine-born humanists as Leonardo Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini, and Benedetto Accolti. Indeed, Black claims that Arezzo was the only Italian town to maintain an unbroken tradition of classical studies from the end of the thirteenth century to the flowering of the Renaissance in...

Aspects de la didactique du Latin au XIXe siècle en France et échos de sa réception par les élèves

We have chosen in this article on the teaching of Latin in France in the nineteenth century to tackle the Latin essays in verse, which students then had to write from the age of fourteen, a practice which was only suppressed in 1880. To help them in this task, the young versifiers could make use of two types of books: poetical dictionaries, the so-calledGradus ad Parnassum, and Latin prosodies. The Gradus provided for each word the words they occur with (their collocations), their synonyms, as well as circumlocutions and, in each case, indications of syllable length. The prosodies offered, in addition to the rules of versification, a great variety of graded exercises meant to teach students how to write all sorts of poems. We have focused on three prosodies that were in common use for several decades and had numerous re-editions and reprints. The artificiality and the drudgery of such writing tasks in the form of hexameters or distichs, for example, could but put students off, even those who were most successful at it. We have found echoes in the writings of Stendhal and of Jules Valles, among others, of the hours spent laboriously writing Latin poems on subjects as anecdotical as “the drowning of a fly in a bowl of milk” or “the death of a parrot”.

Baret's <em>Alvearies</em>: Challenges for the Scholar

John Baret (died 1580) was a Latin teacher in Cambridge. When asked to write a supplement to Thomas Elyot's English-Latin dictionary (1538) he employed several of his former pupils in the task of seeking new quotations. He then decided to turn it into a new dictionary, adding, with the help of Thomas Chaloner and M. Claudius (Claud Holyband?), French equivalents. The resulting dictionaries, The Alvearie, or Triple dictionarie (1573) and The Alvearie or quadruple dictionarie (1580), were hugely successful in England. These dictionaries owe their importance for the history of lexicography to their organization and indexes. Baret based his work on the French-Latin dictionaries of Robert Estienne, both for the Latin and for the French. Through his numbering system he succeeded in transforming his English-Latin-French dictionary into a multi-directional work: Latin-French, Latin-English, French-English, etc. I am particularly interested in the analysis of these dictionaries for the history of Western culture during the Renaissance. In this paper I shall describe the organization of the database for optimal use in this regard. The necessary distinctive units include proper names, literary and proverbial examples and historical references.

The Emperor's New Clothes: Hyperreality and the Study of Latin

The movement to teach Latin by the four skills approach, exemplified by the New York State syllabus Latin for communication, falls within the context of bizarre attempts to convince the public that a dead language is a living language. The psychological factors fueling that movement arise from a perceived need by endangered Latin teachers to survive in a modern language world and from a romantic desire to re‐create the past—where reality is replaced by hyperreality. This obsession with the “real thing” has led to the creation of hyperreal Latin—a prominent feature of the New York State syllabus, which essentially claims to teach students to speak, hear, write, and read Latin like the ancient Romans. The purpose of this article is to refute that spurious and unattainable claim, while calling for a return to an honest and reasonable way of teaching the classical language, along lines that help preserve its uniqueness and traditional integrity.

Rüdiger Pfeiffer. Johann Friedrich Fasch (1688-1758): Leben und Werk. Heinrichshofen Bücher. Wilhelmshaven: Noetzel, 1994. 193 pp. ISBN 3- 7959-0613-X (hardcover) Raymond Dittrich. Die Messen Johann Friedrich Faschs (1688-1758). Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1992. Europäische Hochschulschriften, series 36, vol. 84. 2 vols. 480, 232 pp. ISBN 3-631-45273-X (softcover). [Ph.D. diss., University of Hamburg, 1992.

Rüdiger Pfeiffer. Johann Friedrich Fasch (1688-1758): Leben und Werk. Heinrichshofen Bücher. Wilhelmshaven: Noetzel, 1994. 193 pp. ISBN 3- 7959-0613-X (hardcover) / Raymond Dittrich. Die Messen Johann Friedrich Faschs (1688-1758). Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1992. Europäische Hochschulschriften, series 36, vol. 84. 2 vols. 480, 232 pp. ISBN 3-631-45273-X (softcover). [Ph.D. diss., University of Hamburg, 1992.]. Un article de la revue Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes (Volume 17, numéro 1, 1996, p. 1-155) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Sur quelques facteurs de décadence du latin en France dans la deuxième moitié du dix-neuvième siècle

This article shows, using Michelet and Quinet as examples, how two men of humanistic education, nourished on Latin literature, developed a great distrust of Latin itself. The reasons are predominantly political; the anti-clerical struggle against the Catholic Church and the fear of empires (the second French Empire being compared to the Roman Empire) prevail over the model of the Roman Republic. Thus, contrary to what has sometimes been said, a certain kind of humanistic thinking, developed around the middle of the 19th century, instigated a general tendency, which, during the second half of the century, evolved into systems of higher education without the teaching of Latin.

The Teaching of Latin and Greek in Universities in Australia and New Zealand: Present and Future

Most classical journals report on research on literary, historical and linguistic questions, and rarely allocate space to discussions of pedagogy at tertiary level. This article, however, falls into the latter category. It takes the form of a report on the teaching of Latin and Greek (both classical and post-classical) in universities in Australia and New Zealand; and it makes a number of suggestions regarding the future of the classical languages in this region.Any general examination by an outsider of the situation of Classics in Australian and New Zealand universities would readily conclude that most departments are managing well, or at least holding their own, compared to other disciplines. Student enrolments are high overall, since most departments, like those in Britain and North America, have expanded their teaching range to embrace ancient history, classical literature in translation and, in some cases, archaeology. This has been the situation for the best part of the last two decades. Often these subjects were introduced in order to ‘subsidise’ and protect the continuance of Greek and Latin with their smaller numbers; but they have been extremely popular with students in every university in Australasia in which they are taught. And so these teaching areas have come to have a life and a rightful presence of their own.

Stanley Burnshaw: The New Masses Years

Stanley Burnshaw's broad compass embraces seven decades. He is described by Alfred Kazin as a remarkable writer-biographer, theorist, critic and translator of poetry and a fresh and vivid poet himself in his latest work, A Stanley Burnshaw Reader (1990). Karl Shapiro characterizes him as one of our best respected men of letters. Burnshaw's writing--his poetry foremost--biography, criticism and editing will endure.His critical success, The Seamless Web (1991), a seminal source on e subject of creativity, is praised by James Dickey for its eloquent and persuasive argument (vii). The Poem Itself (1989) deals with some 45 poets translated and presented in a manner that enables English-speaking readers to experience more than 150 poems by modern foreign poets. Burnshaw and his collaborators Provide a radical innovation to the art of poetry translation that 30 years later continues in use by scholars across the country. In the Terrified Radiance (1972) fixes Burnshaw's thesis that poetry starts with the body and ends with the body.Burnshaw is author of 14 books in all, beginning with Poems (1927). His play, The Bridge (1945), is a powerful political allegory. His major prose includes The Sunless Sea (1948), The Refusers: An Epic of the Jews (1981) and Mirages: Travel Notes in the Promised Land (1977)--and some two dozen edited works. Another notable contribution is his biography Robert Frost Himself (1986), an intensely personal view that assures Burnshaw an enduring literary grace-note. As Frost's last editor, Burnshaw produced an insightful work that penetrates the personal obscurity of a prominent public person.Burnshaw's editing career commands a literary niche--first with his early work for the Cordon Company, then as a founder of the Dryden Press and later as a senior editorial officer with Holt, Rinehart and Winston. A little-known part of that career, however, occurs in the mid-1930s when he served as an editor with the New Masses (Stead 125-43). Here Burnshaw was able to work in a literary milieu that reflected his political and sociological beliefs. This article proposes to illuminate that portion of Burnshaw's career.Burnshaw, an ideological radical, was born into privileged circumstances but most of his early work carries a theme for social justice, a call for revolutionary social order and a voice for blacks. His father, a notable influence (My Friend, My Father 1986) on Burnshaw, was a language teacher of Latin, Greek and German, who directed a child-care institution primarily for Jewish victims of the Czarist pogroms. Straitened circumstances after the first World War compelled the family's move to Pittsburgh, where Burnshaw earned a B.A. in 1924. His first job was as advertising copywrite for Blaw-Knox, a steel-product company. He did well and in his free time wrote poetry reflecting his socio-communist ideology. These poems were published in a number of magazines and later collected in The Iron Land (1936).Encouraged and partially financed by his father, Burnshaw and his wife traveled to Europe in 1927-28. Upon his return, he managed to find another advertising position, at Hecht's in New York City, that paid $8,500 a year, a handsome sum for 1929. The trip to Europe failed to liberate Burnshaw from his socialistic ideology, as his father had hoped. Burnshaw sent a group of his poems to the monthly New Masses, which rejected them. Other magazines showed interest, however. While at Hecht's Burnshaw served as a contributing editor for the Marxist Modern Monthly before he joined New Masses.Its predecessor, The Masses (1911-17), was a socialistic magazine described by a former editor as the Bible of the avant-garde (Eastman 302). After it was shut-down by the government during World War I, the magazine was succeed by The Liberator in 1918, a Communist organ, which in turn, was followed by New Masses (NM). From its first issue in 1926 NM became a leading literary voice of social-political protest, the kind of magazine Burnshaw sought. …