What is Literature?

 

 

What follows is an attempt to distill my own theory of literature, portions of which are expressed in dozens of critical essays on individual works.  Doubtless my formulations may preserve traces of the vocabularies of critical schools from New Criticism to Deconstruction, but my own categories have, I think, taken shape a posteriori.   

 

     When I was an undergraduate in the middle sixties in a Midwestern state university, a professor asked his American Literature class to prepare a succinct definition of literature, and the exercise had the desired initial effect. Many of us, like Socrates’ interlocutors, were quite surprised to find that we were less sure of a definition than we had thought. Though many of us were English majors, we had neglected theoretical consideration of the object of our study. Most literary critics took a nearer view, focusing on individual works or authors; with a few exceptions, most notably Northrup Frye, the speculations of philosophers seemed distant from critics’ concerns.  Casebooks for students might include a contribution from a Freudian or Marxist or a hunter after archetypes, but these were understood by most readers as incomplete readings, even if revealing. 

     During the early eighties, my graduate Comparative Literature program might most conveniently be described as Post-Structuralist.  People wrote criticism of criticisms of critics and, in contrast to my earlier experience, rarely descended sufficiently from the airy heights to comment on a specific poem.  It seemed as though the focus had gone in the interval from too close to too distant. 

     While academia may be susceptible to (sometimes salutary) vogues, it is consistently true that every critic operates in certain recurring ways that might be formulated as theoretical assumptions.  Those who claim to have no “theory” are like historians who pretend to an unachievable “objectivity” rather than candidly acknowledging and defending the bases for their judgments.  

     After fifty-five years, I am better prepared to offer an answer to my professor’s question, though I am afraid that the eminent scholar who posed it has departed.  Literature is the symbolic representation of reality, but this description is in itself insufficient, since other writings -- scientific studies, for example -- do the same, and all language is symbolic.  The composer of aesthetic texts explicitly aims to record patterns of consciousness, however, while those who were once called natural philosophers seek to record the phenomena of nature.  The inadequacy of language to represent lived experience and the gap between subjective human experience and some sort of Truth would be defects for other discourses.  However, semantic slippage, imprecision, ambiguity, and reader’s misprision all of which would weaken a laboratory report, become for literature the source of not only beauty, but the only way to capture the play of consciousness in every mind. 

     One of the commonest cliches in criticism is useful to further define literature: good poetry will “delight and instruct,” a goal most identified with Horace, though shared in varying degrees with Aristotle and Boileau and countless others.  As literature is far from alone in these goals, further definition is required. 

     Many things might delight – a good dinner, a sexual experience, or a nap.  Sometimes one derives pleasure from non-literary verbal sources: a pleasing work evaluation, for instance, or a loving letter, yet these are not ordinarily poetry.  

     Unlike the reinforcement of social support signaled by supportive words, the pleasure of art arises from the contemplation of the object in isolation and not from any source outside the page.  People’s minds naturally seek to perceive patterns whether of sound or form or meaning and everyone relishes certain patterns as pure forms without regard for realism or truth.  This is most evident in such genres as instrumental music and abstract painting, but it is present in all reception of art.

     In poetry and, to a lesser extent, in prose, literature employs musical sound patterns based on syllabic stress or vowel quantity or pitch accent, while other devices — among them alliteration, assonance, rhyme, and repetition — fill out the music like the elements of a symphony orchestra.

     Meanwhile, aesthetic texts typically add verbal play resembling riddles and puns and the creation of readers’ expectations which may then be satisfied or not, as well as a rich substratum of allusion and association. All these rhetorical figures are specifically designed to delight and surprise.

     Such symbolic play amuses people.  Surely the most distinctive characteristic of our species is our facility in the manipulation of symbols. A person composing or consuming literature is then to the highest degree realizing human potential in the same way a soaring skylark is enacting a specific bird essence. One derives a certain exhilaration from doing what one does well, what one’s species does well.  Whatever else it may be, reading a poem is glorying in being human to the fullest extent, free from functional ends, enjoying one’s own nature like a happy dog.

     Unlike a Jackson Pollock painting or a Bach fugue, though, poetry virtually always refers to lived experience. Yet words are not capable of a direct reflection of reality. They always mediate and refract or include wish fulfillment or in some way convey no universal and objective vision but rather an individual and personal one. Though for science this imperfect representation would be an obstacle, for art it allows the expression of the irrational, the appetitive, the mysterious, the ambiguous, and the ambivalent. Though most of psychic life occurs in these realms, they are rarely explicit in people’s daily transactions, which are consciously felt by many to be largely rational.

     The fact is that we know nothing beyond our own subjectivity. Thus literature, or rather, art is general, is the closest we can approach to truth. The fact that every individual’s experience differs from every other’s, while it complicates matters considerably, in fact renders the view of literature as a whole more comprehensive, more precise, more accurate than other discourses such as history or science. The artist has no special purchase on truth, though claims of inspiration direct from the gods or muses are common. The reader of a broad variety of texts will, however, find in their combination enlightenment absent from any in isolation. In a process like an increasingly sophisticated triangulation the reader who knows several visions will have a view enriched beyond the one who knows but one.  In this way literature exponentially increases experience, allowing access to visions ancient and modern from the myriad cultures of this teeming planet.

     The genres of literature are universal, though not all occur in every setting, and each has a role. Proverbs preserve the prudential wisdom of the group, made memorable by turn of phrase or figure of speech. Folk stories provide nightly amusement as well as reinforcing (and sometimes questioning) social norms. Epics allow for an encyclopedic inclusion of history, religion, and social codes in the course of a stirring tale. Theater presents stories with characters drawn from myth or from familiar society for the reception of the entire community. Meanwhile, all these forms are used by religion to establish itself as a unique source of guidance and by leaders to consolidate and authenticate power. Lyric poetry typically voices the subjectivity of passionate individuals.

     The criteria of literature may be consciously present in a work’s production or its consumption, but neither is necessary. Many works written with other goals in mind have been appreciated as art: Herodotus, St. John of the Cross, Marx, and Freud, to cite a few random examples. On the other hand scholars have utilized literary texts as a source of data to investigate history, philology, comparative botany, or countless other fields. A witty turn of phrase by a physics professor delivering a scientific paper creates a moment of literature, while a linguist searching Homer for a rare grammatical form may see no poetry at all.

     In making such distinctions the only probative elements are found within the work itself, not in any intention of the creator. Some works are directed primarily at their audience, often with didactic aims. A paraliterary example is advertising which uses all the devices of literature with sales as the sole goal. Other works arise from their makers’ interest in self-expression. Such solipsism is extreme in outsider artists, but is present to one degree or another in all. Some writing is directed at the artifact itself, for instance, for those who espouse art for art’s sake.

     Thus determining value must be grounded in the success of individual works as well as genres in achieving specific goals. One poem may foreground description as in Pope’s “Windsor Forest” while for another psychology assumes greatest importance as in the Spoon River Anthology.  Narrative is central to epic and lapidary craft to Symbolism. Paradise Lost aims to instruct perhaps and Canterbury Tales to entertain, though each, of course, does both. Swinburne does his best to get by on sound while early Bly is all about images.

     In fact nearly every poem is a complex structure of a good many of these considerations, each weighted precisely to the requirements of the specific project. Thus in Hopkins melody will take the lead, with theme following behind, and images in third position.

     Then there is the imponderable element of beauty. One can prescribe symmetry and harmony and yet an asymmetrical and discordant work may prove to have many admirers. Taste may be explained but not proven. One may praise the taste of oysters without persuading a reluctant diner to share your plate, and in the same way, I may think Keats a greater poet than Shelley and make enlightening comments on both, but I will not convince Shelley’s partisans of my preference. 

     The moment of a reader’s reception provides the measure of every work.  An unprepared student may scan the lines of Shakespeare in vain, while a skilled critic may find much fascinating meaning and considerable symbolic imagery in a television game show.  Those works which have been read and reread accumulate significance.  Scriptures such as the Vedas and the Hebrew Testament illustrate this principle, but so, in a different way, does Bunuel’s L’Age d’Or.  There is no way to prove the greatness of a poem or a novel, but the critic who has experienced literary beauty can seek to characterize the experience with sufficient clarity to convey to others the source and character of that experience, much as the poet or novelist has sought to do.     

     Literature is sufficiently essential to human life that it is found in every society and likely has been at least since the development of language. People with the most limited material culture invariably possess rich stores of verbal technology, useful for encoding their world, providing entertainment as well as preserving knowledge and constructing avenues of spiritual access, all while sitting around a glowing campfire or perhaps a glowing iPad, passing the time.

Hazlitt on the Nature of Poetry

Quotations without references are from the first chapter of Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets, “Introductory: On Poetry in General.”


     Hazlitt is for me one of the most reliable of practical critics. His comments are virtually always revealing, strongly felt, and very often sufficiently in accord with my own taste to seem incisive. He is far from assertive about theory, suggesting that his reactions are impressionistic, that he seeks merely “to feel what is good.” He explicitly discounts theoretical aesthetics which would have been of limited use in any event to his productive career as a periodical journalist, reviewer, and popular lecturer, though in his day the general public was at least literate enough to attend a series of talks on poetry. “You decide from feeling and not from reason; that is, from the impression of a number of things in the mind . . . though you may not able to analyze or account for it in the several particulars.” [1]
     Impressionistic criticism, apart from some forms of reader response theory, is little valued today, but it was positively encouraged by Romantic ideology valuing the individual and the irrational. It also received a certain authority by association with Longinus’ “On the Sublime” in contrast to the prescriptive principles of Aristotle, especially in Boileau’s version which appealed to neo-classicists. [2] Hazlitt was in fact labeled “the Longinus of the Cockneys” by a scornful critic [3], though the writer wished probably more to ridicule his lack of academic education than to point out actual similarities with Longinus. The very concept of the sublime is itself subjective, dependent on a sort of readerly enthusiasm altogether resistant to system.
     Impressionistic criticism is natural as well to an author who defined the familiar style. “To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.” [3] Though he defended the use of rhetorical flourished in poetry, attacking “frigid and pedantic critics, for reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common sense and reason,” his ideal in writing prose for the general reader was an appearance of colloquial spontaneity.
     Still, Hazlitt’s statement that one’s general assumptions “may” not be evident provides a prudent conditional, admitting the possibility that the critic’s impressions may willy-nilly fall into patterns that suggest a theoretical foundation, as indeed I believe they do for all thoughtful readers. Hazlitt in fact had a taste for philosophy. He was familiar with the principal thinkers of his day and was early influenced by Coleridge who did not shrink from philosophizing.
     The first of his Lectures on the English Poets concerns “Poetry in General,” and there Hazlitt states some general principles that he considers to have guided his judgments. Hazlitt’s resistance to any intellectual or analytical approach to poetry is evident in his opening sentence which defines a poem as “the natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it.” He emphasizes with the words “natural” and “involuntary” the nearly autonomic operation of art in its record and communication of states of consciousness and locates the aesthetic event in the consumer’s mind, or, as his era would have said, in the imagination.
     The mind, as psychologists have demonstrated through the last hundred and more years, is far from ruled by reason. Hazlitt was well aware that every subjectivity is unique: “the imagination will distort or magnify the object, and convert it into the likeness of whatever is most proper to encourage the fear [or other strong emotion]. 'Our eyes are made the fools' of our other faculties. This is the universal law of imagination.” Passion is part of human vision.
     Hazlitt quite accurately notes that poetry gives recognition to the fundamental role of emotion when he says, “poetry then is an imitation of nature, but the imagination and the passions are a part of man's nature.” For him “poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling.” This is no distortion or displacement of truth, but rather its approximation since “If poetry is a dream, the business of life is much the same.” It is the non-dreamlike characterization that would be false, and the poet is the truest reporter of consciousness. “All live in a world of their own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all the others think and act.”
     Demonstrating his own “high-wrought enthusiasm,” Hazlitt pushes this notion, though, much too far. One can accept his assertion that “The child is a poet in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or repeats the story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd-boy is a poet, when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers.” These are, after all, little dramas involving the illumination and animation of reality with play. But Hazlitt includes as well under his capacious rubric of poetry “the miser, when he hugs his gold” and “the tyrant, who fancies himself a god.” Poetry would then be found whenever one finds meaning or emotion in the details of the environment. The two actors -- poet and reader -- are no longer necessary in this view. Apparently, anyone who experiences emotion is a solitary and perhaps a mute poet through the very fact of subjectivity.
     For Hazlitt the desire for pleasure and the sensations of strong emotion are the wellsprings of poetry. “Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions.” “It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have.” “It relates to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind.” Yet these characterizations discount the appeal of ingenuity, subtlety, and the appearance of truth, all of which are as likely to distinguish a poem as melodic beauty or the expression of powerful feelings. Pleasure and pain and rationality and emotion are not the only dualities people seek to bridge with art.
     Hazlitt’s essential definition of the poem emphasizes the Romantic values of naturalness, subjectivism, fancy, and passion, and the words “natural” and “involuntary” suggest an almost automatic writing. It is as though the poem emerges spontaneously like a sudden geyser, art generated by sympathetic magic rather than craft. The feeling that had simply appeared in the author is then elicited automatically from the reader by the little machine of words. “The natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it.”
     Hazlitt is elsewhere more succinct: “It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have.” Similarly, “Poetry in its matter and form is natural imagery or feeling, combined with passion and fancy.” The only concession to the role of craft is the word “perfect.” Though he does admit that “There is a near connexion between music and deep-rooted passion,” the association of form and content sounds accidental. The sounds simply accompany the ideas. “As there are certain sounds that excite certain movements, and the song and dance go together, so there are, no doubt, certain thoughts that lead to certain tones of voice, or modulations of sound, and change 'the words of Mercury into the songs of Apollo'.”
     Literature and art in general do foreground emotion, pleasure, and the irrational in a way that more closely reflects the actual operations of human consciousness than do such discourses as science and mathematics, yet few would agree that every subjective experience of any power is poetry. Hazlitt’s view of the sublime, which he shared with many of his age, encourages such a broad definition of poetry.
     Though for Longinus the sublime is associated only with eloquent and powerful language, likely to express grand and lofty thoughts, in the eighteenth-century Edmund Burke declared terror the “ruling principle of the sublime." He noted the unique power of fear to induce “astonishment,” “that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other." For Wordsworth existential contemplation induces an “aspect more sublime; that blessed mood” [5] in which one apprehends the mysterium tremendum of the cosmos and yet feels intimately connected.
     For Hazlitt the reward need not be so profound. For him passion of any sort is a dynamo that “shows us the rich depths of the human soul: the whole of our existence, the sum total of our passions and pursuits.” It would be difficult to distinguish Aeschylus from Elmore Leonard in Hazlitt’s formulation: “The pleasure, however, derived from tragic poetry . . .has its source and groundwork in the common love of strong excitement.” By imagining “that which we desire and that which we dread” we are made to “drink deeper of the cup of human life.”

Further, as poetry, unlike the data of everyday experience, is ordered, it facilitates a wish fulfilment through symbolic manipulation. Poetry “raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity, by conforming the shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things as reason and history do.” Poetry is able “to take the language of the imagination from off the ground, and enable it to spread its wings where it may indulge its own impulses ‘Sailing with supreme dominion/Through the azure deep of air –‘”
     Consistent with the skepticism implied by an impressionism that feels more powerfully than it knows, Hazlitt questions the representational potential of words in terms that resemble those of semioticians and post-structuralists. According to Hazlitt “Poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest other forms; feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings.” What Hazlitt maintains for the aesthetic text, for poetry, Saussure had claimed for all signification, that signs are relational and can refer only to other signs.
     Like Saussure, [6] Hazlitt also stresses the arbitrariness of linguistic signs. For him “the ordinary construction of language” is a thing “altogether arbitrary and conventional. Neither in the sounds themselves, which are the voluntary signs of certain ideas, nor in their grammatical arrangements in common speech, is there any principle of natural imitation, or correspondence to the individual ideas, or to the tone of feeling with which they are conveyed to others.”
     Though he carried forward the latest intellectual trends of his day, Hazlitt’s conclusion is elegiac and backward-looking, almost as if he foresaw the decline of poetry as a popular art. To him science will inevitably assimilate the role of art as knowledge increases. “The progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency, to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry. The province of the imagination is principally visionary the unknown and undefined: the understanding restores things to their natural boundaries and strips them of their fanciful pretensions.” At the end of the essay, Hazlitt illustrates his concepts by examining four of the “principal works” of poetry. Most contemporary readers will accept his judgement that Homer, the Bible, and Dante belong in that category, but his fourth choice is Ossian. His attention to the nostalgia for a one-time poetic vigor imagined among the primitive is familiar also in Blake, Keats, and, indeed, in the general vogue for Macpherson’s Ossian long after his historicity had been questioned.
     While Hazlitt’s views have affinities with such twentieth century trends as deconstruction and reader response theory, his rhetoric is firmly founded in the values of Romanticism. These have led him to speak as though all experiences of emotion, all sensations of pleasure and pain are within the ambit of art, though these broad gestures weaken neither his other theoretical statements nor his practical criticism. Both the strengths and weaknesses of his essay are apparent in the following single sentence which might serve as an epitome of his approach. “Impassioned poetry is an emanation of the moral and intellectual part of our nature, as well as of the sensitive -- of the desire to know, the will to act, and the power to feel; and ought to appeal to these different, parts of our constitution, in order to be perfect.” To Hazlitt poetry was the highest expression of the complete human consciousness, an exalted vision, but one worth recalling in this belated age.



1. See “On Genius and Common Sense.” Later in the nineteenth century Pater provided further support for a similar approach. In the Introduction to The Renaissance, he says “The first step toward seeing one’s subject as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly.”

2. Though Longinus had been translated into English earlier, William Smith's version, published in 1739 proved particularly widely read and influential. Boileau had published a French translation in 1674.

3. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Review vol. 16 “Cockney Contributions for the First of April” July 1824.

4. Burke, On the Sublime (1757), ed. J. T. Bolton. 58. To Burke the beautiful and the sublime are complementary. His emphasis on terror provided the theoretical base for the Gothic novel.

5. "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," 37-8.

6. See Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics.

The Uses of the Monstrous: Chaucer’s “Anelida and Arcite”

     Horace begins his “Ars Poetica” [1] by recommending propriety and adherence to convention, suggesting that works with ill-fitting parts lack unity and must be monstrous, similar to a human with a horse’s neck or a feathered mammal. He says a beautiful woman above the waist whose body is that of a fish below is unsightly and, at best, comic.
     Yet that last example might imply that even monsters have their uses. What struck Horace as a hideous freak was to Tennyson an ideal of beauty: “I would be a mermaid fair.” [2] Chaucer’s “Anelida and Arcite” is generally slighted by critics, largely because of its discordances. A recent critic characterizes the poem’s reputation in short by describing it as “one of Chaucer’s most abused poems.” [3]
     The poet himself may have shared this dismissive attitude. The work is unfinished, which certainly could suggest a failed experiment, though many of Chaucer’s other works, including, of course, the monumental Canterbury Tales, is similarly incomplete. Despite its well-accepted place in his canon from contemporary scholars, Chaucer himself did not mention it when cataloguing his works. To many it is an ungainly compound of the third person narration in uniform stanzas and the metrically elaborate first person complaint. The combination of sources -- from Boccaccio in the story and Machaut in the stanzas given to Anelida [4] -- has better pleased scholars tracing Chaucer’s career than those looking for coherence, unity, and organic form. Chaucer himself mentions neither influence directly, but claims Statius as his source, going to the length of including a few lines from the Thebaid as a sort of guarantee. Having dodged acknowledging his French and Italian sources, he compounds the question by mentioning a certain “Corynne,” generally identified with the female Greek poet contemporary with Pindar. He further confuses the issue of sources by using the name of a figure in Boccaccio to tell a story that seems to be original with him. His elusiveness about the issue of authority may be taken as an emblem that well represents the ambiguities the poem presents as a whole.
     The fact that the poem is unfinished marks it for some as inferior, an aborted experiment, perhaps, unworthy even in the eyes of its creator. However, one might as well view its truncated form as exemplary of lived experience, for is not every one cut off in life rudely before one is sufficiently prepared? One can lend cast one’s autobiography in a comely form, but the result is artful and not inevitable. The lack of an ending then might be regarded as rendering the poem more adequate to represent life as lived.
     The double invocation must strike the reader as odd. It seems epic in ambition, though the poem lacks such a grand scale. What follows is anything but an epic; the story is primarily a frame for the complaint. The second invocation, to the Muses, might pass as a throw-away convention, but the first to Mars is more surprising. War is only in the background of what plot there is, but the mention of the god of war, the lover of Venus, though here immediately doubled by a female counterpart Bellona, reminds the reader of the countless poems -- Romance of the Rose, which Chaucer translated, for one -- in which male/female relations are represented in terms of battles. Chaucer here lightly evokes that immense field of associations which reinforces the suggestion of peril and vulnerability that accompanies love. In an echo of this martial opening, “The Story” does open with the aftermath of military action and, in fact, the “ymage of Mars” carried in the field, (31) the public suffering of war preceding the private suffering of love-longing.
     It is as though Chaucer is playing a game with his reader’s expectations. Writing at a time when convention and its play were centrally important to poetry, he yet managed to twist the tropes round to make something new. One of the conventions he honors by refracting in unpredictable ways is the appeal to authority. Chaucer claims value for his work by attributing it to imitation of a Classical model. “First folowe I Stace” (l. 21) implies that he derives his poem from Statius’ Thebaid. The manuscripts even open “The Story” with a few lines of Statius’ Latin. Yet in fact Boccaccio’s Teseida is his most significant source for the narrative and Machaut for the complaint. Unsatisfied with this shell game, he realizes he can do as he pleases because his story is basically an original one, after all, and he tosses off another source: “Corynne” (21), generally identified with the Greek poet contemporary with Pindar. This suggestion, apart from the satisfaction of its providing another male/female doubling, is entirely a playful red herring. As Chaucer comments, time has a way of devouring all things. (12 ff.)
     The implications of this complex attribution of authority are clear: every work is original and no work is original. Where one thinks a notion arose may be altogether different from where it in fact did. The Classics provide a rich field for training readers in the fabulous potential of poetic language, but they are not the last word. Experimentation seems to assert itself in one aspect after another of “Anelida and Arcite”
     The combination of narrative and complaint might be considered as a representation of the duality of objective/subjective in everyday life. Instead of constituting an aesthetic failing it may be a bold move to record life as it is experienced. The continual check of one’s sense of what seems true to the observer on the individual subjectivity is one of the consistent rhythms of consciousness.
     While apparently Chaucer’s own invention, the story is in part quite traditional. Anelida suggests the archetype of the faithful woman like Constance in the “Man of Law’s Tale” or Griselda in “The Clerk’s Tale.” Her loyalty is contrasted with Arcite’s faithlessness which is not portrayed as the failing of an individual but rather as a typical male characteristic since the time of the first polygamist: “he were fals, for hit is kynde of man/ Sith Lamek was.” (149-150) [6] Men’s pursuit of novelty in love is said to be inherent: “The kynde of mannes herteis to delyte/ In thing that straunge is.” (201-202)
     Arcite is said to have used the conventions of love poetry with exactly the same rhetorical competence that Anelida displays, but toward his own false and treacherous ends. To him the “ful mykel besynesse” (99) of the seduction includes declaring that his is like to go mad or to “dyen for distresse.” (101) Thus the plot arises from the capacity of language to represent either truth or lies, positioning even the text itself balanced on a ridgepole of doubt. Whereas compliance with readers’ conventional expectations will in general reaffirm received ideas, Chaucer’s innovative manipulation of familiar literary usages must cultivate critical questioning.
     Almost in order to wink at the twenty-first century critic, the author specifically refers to his “slye wey” of writing. (48) [7] Whether that be a mirage or not, with its fragmentary character, its wild wrenching of convention, and its “sly” self-questioning, “Anelida and Arcite” may be read as an early predecessor of modernism. Horace’s rule covers in fact only half the house of literature: those texts which reinforce (or refine or further develop) preconception. It is through the violation of convention that authors question assumptions and introduce new ideas and forms.


1. More properly the Epistula ad Pisones.

2. From “The Mermaid.” Of course, in general the mermaid’s beauty is balanced against her destructive potential exemplified by the Sirens of the Odyssey or the Lorelei. Many other tropes exist such as the frightening and serious mermaids of Neruda “Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks” and Yeats “The Man Young and Old: iii “The Mermaid.”

3. T. S. Miller, “Chaucer's Sources and Chaucer's Lies: Anelida and Arcite and the Poetics of Fabrication,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 114, No. 3 (July 2015), pp. 373-400. To Manly it was “purely an experiment in versification.” (Chaucer and the Rhetoricians, 98).

4. The debt to Boccaccio is evident throughout the narrative; that to Machaut is exhaustively demonstrated by Madeleine Fabin in “On Chaucer's Anelida and Arcite,” Modern Language Notes , Vol. 34, No. 5 (May, 1919), 266-272).

5. Compare the use in the “Friar’s Tale” to describe the summoner’s system of spies. “A slyer boye nas noon in Engelond.” (Canterbury Tales 1322)

6. “Kind,” of course, or “kynde” meant nature or natural in Middle English. In the University of Michigan MED: “inherent qualities or properties of persons, animals, plants, elements, medicines, etc.; essential character.”

7. Lines 162-164 question whether any poet might be able to do justice to the story, asking “what man hath the cunnyng or the wit?” Though “cunning” at the time meant only competence, it already by the late 16th century suggested trickery, implying the same duality of truth and lie. This association must surely have been taking shape for some time.

Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" as Structuralist Charm

“All the world know the beauty of the beautiful and in doing this they have [the idea of] what ugliness is ... so it is that existence and non-existence give birth the one to [the idea of] the other." (from Legge's old version of ch. 2 of the author he called Lao Tzŭ)


     As a metaphysical principle, of course, Lao Tzu's proposition may be tested against any phenomenon, but it has special relevance to the examination of literary texts. Literature has always excelled in dialectic. Often poetry arises in the tension between true and not true, between sweet and bitter. Metaphor always declares that the tenor both is and is not the vehicle (to use I. A. Richards’ terms). In a relatively recent restatement of this principle, Paul de Man identifies, as an essential characteristic of literature, “the self-reflecting mirror effect by means of which a work of fiction asserts, by its very existence, its separation from empirical reality.” Later, he suggests that even a critic structures his work “in terms of a series of dramatic events: reversals, repetitions, about-faces, and resolutions.”
     These considerations illuminate a reading of Shelley in particularly useful ways — Shelley is, after all, a definitive type of the alienated self-conscious modern artist. His “Ode to the West Wind” is a programmatic statement and self-portrait, and both the program and the portrait are projected in antinomies so dynamic as to resemble an engine’s pulsing pistons, or, more accurately, the turning of a gyroscope.
     One may begin to examine the oscillations with a common initial response to the poem’s tensions: the recognition of the wind as a quasi-divine animating pneuma which revivifies the poet and promises a future bloom of his faculties. To this system one may associate the suggestions of hymn-like entreaty (for the poet’s ego-driven desires), of revolution (for the fulfillment of society), and of apocalypse (for the collapse of dualities, a state beyond enlightenment).
     Not far behind this reading, though, lurks its sinister counterpart: if spring is near, then a following winter is equally implied with every contrary discomfort and threat. Apart from the threats to the poet’s comfort from a winter of depression, suffering, repression, and ignorance (to follow the thematic registers noted above), the whole progression assumes a static cyclic quality against which the poet’s emotions, while poignant, are absurd. His descent is merely the low point on a psychic roll which, like the year and Sisyphus, will meaninglessly rise and fall. Similarly, in the Purana with which Zimmer begins his Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, Indra, the old divine monarch, is humbled and taught detachment by the vision of universes coming and going, “an innumerable host,” out of every pore of the body of Vishnu. How then to assert the self?
     One may step one stage further back (the poem itself rings all these changes) and regard the repetitive ups and downs as exemplifying the soul of vitality itself, its rhythm or heartbeat, hence rendering any intensely experienced moments on its course self-validating. Then, however, the reader recalls that the poem's starting point is negative and, while balance is apparently present, autumn and sorrow are more potently present than their contraries, destroyer is mentioned before preserver, the seablooms tremble, etc.
     To take this dance only one step further, the sense of exalted energy is undeniable. The wind is wakening. Pleasure is seen as torpor. Indeed, the poem itself is evidence of Shelley's poetic vitality, the gift for which he was praying. Thus the victory is inherent in the words on the page. As we hear in Oedipus (l. 896) the dancing of the chorus is itself evidence that the land is well-regulated.
     The rhyme scheme and stanzaic organization support this movement as each tercet contains its own successor and opposite, unstable, impelling progress, and yet each stanza is finished off by a couplet which suggests settled balance. One feels neither the forward linear movement of a wholly stichic form nor the rounded volumes of a stanza’s completion. By almost being sonnets, yet not quite, the parts of the poem tease the reader and resist definition.
     On a smaller scale the same dialectical cunning is apparent. Note, for instance, the pairing of ashes and sparks as an image, or of chained and tameless. Note the provocative “if” in the last line.
     Acoustic elements are likewise active in structuring Shelley's engine of contraries. Initial “w” is a key sound, announced in the title and the strident first lines. These “w”s embody the wind and increase through the poem (as a matter of fact, the tabulator of lines with w’s in each ten lines of text will discover the following pattern: 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5). Thus they first appear to represent a passage in time, a phenomenon with a distinct beginning and end, an entity free from the eternal recurrence. The words are carefully selected, though and strengthen the overall structure at the same time as they cast doubt on it. The next occurrences of the sound after the opening line are in “wintry” and “winged,” the first implying death and the second new life. The pair after these is “will” [“be a sepulcher”] and “waken,” again two wholly opposed aspects of the action of the wind.
     The wind is the opposition, the tension, but in no harmonious sense. The dialectic is never resolved. Shelley experiences no place where the joy and pain of interpenetration cease; rather, by imagining such a place, he renders both joy and pain more acute. What might have been a lament on the conditions of human life or a panegyric to the cosmic design, becomes, though its beauty, a bit of magic warding off despair and psychic dissolution. The order of words, though only intensifying the agony of existence, strikes a redemptive pose. The tension of bipolar oppositions is at once foregrounded and ameliorated.

Transformation of Convention in Mechthild von Magdeburg

(Here I deploy the tools of deconstruction to discuss a medieval German mystic. The essay first appeared in the Mystics Quarterly which had recently raised its ambitions and revised its format. In its earlier incarnation, it had been called the 14th Century Mystics Newsletter, which suggested to me Monty Python's hermits exchanging pleasantries.)


     An understanding of the varieties of intertextuality is essential to a fully competent reading of medieval literature. For centuries critics recommended and poets practiced principles of imitation, convention, and reliance on “auctoritee” which little recognized the post-Romantic ideal represented by Pound's dictum "Make it new!" Too often, however, relations between texts are reduced either to simple similarity (in which case it is called “influence” or a topos) or difference (in the twentieth century often praised as innovation or irony). In fact, every linguistic utterance, including the intentionally aesthetic, is generated by the simultaneous observance and violation of convention. Intertextuality thickens the density of the information borne by the literary code in ways that have received little systematic investigation. Even the prescriptions of theoreticians such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Matthew of Vendome are often treated as though they were nothing but stultifying recipe books for producing acceptable hackwork, whereas in reality the rhetorical writers consistently advocate not the replication but the transformation, the "rejuvenation"-'- of past models.
     Mechthild von Magdeburg’s Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit [2] provides an illuminating case study of the semantic implications of the appropriation of convention. She has received little attention as a poet, [3] usually mentioned rather in accounts of the Frauenmystik of her era, but she provides a most useful paradigm for the consideration of the general problem of convention. In a broad sense she may be said to have adapted the devices of the secular Minnesang tradition to describe her mystical experiences. Though this makes her vulnerable to psychoanalytic intrusion [4] as well as literary oversimplification, she used the conventions of the courtly literature of her day, not only because it provided a convenient poetic vocabulary, nor simply in default of a better option for the expression of the ineffable, but as a strategy carefully calculated and artfully appropriate. A close reading of her work indicates the way in which the adaptation of genres, situations, and imagery devised for poetry of worldly love increases the efficiency of her own writing by imposing a new layer of semantic association over the old and creating from the juxtaposition of the two an altogether new meaning. Examination of several particularly problematic images which emphasize the tension or incongruity between the divine and human love relation indicates, not an artistic failure, but rather an extraordinary and dramatic reversal of meaning. This process illustrates a significant variety of intertextuality and suggests a provocative set of implications about literature and language as a whole.
     Long before Mechthild, of course, Christian writers had spoken of the love of God in terms derived from human love. The Song of Songs, the central scriptural text for Jews and Christians which belongs in this tradition due to its interpretation if not its original intention, had received much clerical and popular attention as a result of the commentaries of Bernard of Clairvaux during the century before Mechthild's time, and many writers raided it for directly Biblical systems of imagery. Many of the great texts of early German literature speak of Mary or the personified church in terminology that suggests the lover speaking of his beloved. [5] Furthermore, it must be made clear that Minnesang conventions are not ubiquitous or even dominant in Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit. More common, for instance, are pieces structured as lists intended to serve as meditation guides or as easily remembered moral instruction.
     She was a devotional rather than an intellectual poet, and she found in Minnesang qualities useful to the expression of her themes. The language of hyperbole which has always ornamented much love poetry, the emotional similarities between the spiritual and corporeal giving of oneself in rapturous attachment, the suffering of the pains of separation, and the discipline of a dedicated program of self-development to make oneself worthy of the beloved are all closely congruent areas that, in her work as well as in others, made direct borrowing possible.
     Thus she adopts the general terms of the standard situation of courtly love with little change (apart from the sexual reversal necessitated by the poet's being a woman). If Christ or God is conceived as a young man and his social status as aristocratic, it is obvious that his physical beauty is nothing but the projection of essential excellence and his nobility an analogue for a profounder loftiness.[6] The vicissitudes of a love affair parallel those of the contemplative life, by now familiar through the writings of many who succeeded Mechthild and systematized for our time by the popular books of Evelyn Underhill and others. The culmination of earthly love in sexual union is depicted, too, by Mechthild in terms not far different from other writers on the subjects of spiritual betrothal, marriage, and union.
     Mechthild goes beyond the general Christian tradition, though into further correspondences specifically recalling Minnesang. A list of the main elements significant in each variety of love drama would include the initial Gruss by which the beloved signals the suitor that there is some hope of favor, the lovers' communication by intermediaries and messages, the presence of jealous watchers who seek to frustrate the fulfillment of the love, the process of self-refinement (sometimes compared to the transmutation of gross elements in the alchemist's crucible), the speaker's denigration of self and exaltation of the love object, and the wash of bitter-sweetness over the whole experience. All of these elements are examples of simple transference, since their basic meaning and function in the structure of the relationship is identical in secular and divine love poetry. Mechthild uses them as a kind of shorthand that will immediately indicate to the reader that a vast range of experience and emotion with which he is familiar may help him toward a sympathetic understanding of her own. Two brief examples will suffice to demonstrate the existence and nature of this sort of adaptation of convention to a new context.
     Gruss is at once a genre of poetry and a ritualized part of the Minne drama. It is the acknowledgment that encourages the lover, however slightly, to continue his attentions. Though she does not, by granting a Gruss, commit herself in any way, she would be blameworthy were she to mislead a lover with such a greeting when his quest was wholly in vain. The Gruss, then, is a promise of the potential of the future, though it does no more than open the possibility of eventual success. A long process must normally follow after the lady has met her suitor's eyes or inclined her head toward him in a Gruss before the affair progresses to its next stage.
     For Mechthild, this Gruss is an "inner” one, promised by the divine lover's "blessed eyes." [9] Like the aristocratic lady, he inclines his head toward her, though in his case it is in reality the "holy tree of the Trinity" [10] that nods in promise. Most revealing, perhaps, is the passage concluding Mechthild’s magnificent dialogue between the soul and knowledge: "The true greeting of God comes from the divine blood." [11] Thus the promise of a potential love relationship with God is contained in the sacrifice of Christ's crucifixion which alone makes human redemption possible. It does not commit God to the salvation of any given soul, but it opens the way for the soul to begin the process of making itself worthy. Thus Mechthild retains the naturalistic associations of the Gruss and exploits her audience's familiarity with the details of the secular code of love while making a structurally similar point in a compressed and vivid way.
     Another motif common to Minnesang and Mechthild is the Bote or messenger. This, too, is a poetic form (as the message may be the entire contents of a poem) as well as a part of the Minne drama. Reinmar's "Lieber bote, nu wirp also” [12] is a good example of the dramatic function of the Bote. As the lovers are separated, the woman's longing is represented as heightened; the poignance of the situation is increased by the fact that she must entrust her intimate feelings to an intermediary. Thus the Bote convention allows the simultaneous expression of loving affection and frustration.
Boten figure in several of Mechthild's poems. [13] They generally convey the very same emotional mixture outlined above. More interesting, however, is her preface which begins with the following words:


ONE SHOULD GLADLY RECEIVE THIS BOOK SINCE GOD HIMSELF SPEAKS ITS WORDS
I send this book as a messenger to all spiritual people, both good and bad, since when the pillars of the church fall, the building cannot stand, and since it portrays Myself alone and announces my secrets with praise. [14]


     Here the entire book is said to be the word of God sent as a messenger, like a love note or like Christ, to assure the people of the world of God's love. The indirect form of the communication and the mention of the peril of the church's fall, however, admit the difficulties preventing perfect intercourse. Like the previous example, this use of the Bote requires an audience previously familiar with Minnesang convention. Building upon the earlier poetic Bote, she may suggest without explicit mention the theological doctrine of salvation by grace and express by means of the single word "botte" an entire dramatic relationship.
     These are examples of relatively simple transference since the elements borrowed from secular poetry retain the same structural role and fundamental meaning in Mechthild's work. The relation may be considerably more problematic, however, in certain examples of shared imagery which cannot be satisfactorily interpreted as carrying an isomorphic semantic load in each system. In particular, the images of the nightingale, of plucked blossoms, and of the dew seem at first to be infelicitously placed in a setting where their conventional associations are cramped or altogether blocked. These represent Mechthild's most provocative and intriguing use of Minnesang, a use which in fact exploits the specific resources of poetic language especially fully.
     The nightingale is unmentioned in the Bible, but appears frequently in classical and medieval literature. Probably the most important single source for its connotations in the Middle Ages is Ovid's version of the story of Philomela. [15] In this tale and in others, the nightingale is associated with frustration, longing, and the transience of the pleasures of love. It was, indeed, sometimes used as the type for worldly love as opposed to religious devotion, or as the emblem for superstition generally. [16] This area of meaning has been consistent even up to the present day. Among the many examples of medieval German lyrics evoking the nightingale as a symbol of fleeting or unsatisfied love are the anonymous "Nahtegal, sing einen don mit sinne" and Wolfram's "Ursprinc bluomen, loup uz dringen."
     Mechthild again assumes that these traditional connotations are known to her readers. She represents longing and love and mystery with the bird, but in the end, her nightingale poses a direct challenge to the nightingale of earlier poets. In her most grandly encyclopedic piece [19], she hears the nightingale's song, but to her it sings of "melodious union with God," of "holy knowledge." [20] Thus, while the worldly nightingale is ultimately a bird of loss, representing the distance between what is desired and what is attained, a moving image for the inevitable failure of human aspiration, for Mechthild it becomes very nearly the opposite, a symbol of glory which is reachable. The limitless energies of her nightingales derive from the very same source as the limitations of others. She says, "The nightingale must always sing, for its nature plays – it is made of love.” [21] In another poem she equates the nightingale with the dove, the symbol of holy wisdom, as creatures uniquely qualified to dwell before the majesty of God." [22] Whereas the Bote and the Gruss were used to construct analogies between different registers of similar experience, the image of the nightingale contradicts itself. Mechthild employs the previous associations to heighten her own usage by contrast, by emphatic inappropriateness.
     Imagery of flowers permeates both Minnesang and Mechthild's work. In both places it is sometimes merely decorative, sometimes subtly linked to the world-energies evoked by the renewal of life in the springtime, but the most intensely erotic flower imagery is that of broken or plucked blossoms. This is again traceable to classical poetry as in Sappho's fragment. [23] Probably the most well-known use of this image in Minnesang is found in Walther's famous "Under der linden,” [24] where the female speaker describes the broken blossoms as the only witness other than the nightingale to their tryst. She implies the hostility of society to their love by her anxiety over secrecy and speaks fondly but warily of the transience of their pleasures. The ephemeral flowers are an apt means of expressing this sort of love. Their brief period of bloom and the sense of violence and destruction inherent in the act of plucking them conflict with the simple celebration of their beauty.
     Many of Mechthild's images of plucked, strewn, or broken flowers are consistent with the traditional meanings. They are sometimes simply decorative offerings [25] or rather vaguer mysterious enchantments, [26] but perhaps Mechthild's most striking use of the image is in her passage on the orchard of love.


I exist in myself
everywhere and in all things
as I was from the very beginning.
I wait for you in the orchard of love
and break for you the blooms of sweet union
and make you a bed
from the flourishing grass of holy knowledge.
[27]


     Here the parallel between sexual union and mystical union supports the traditional associations of the image, but there can be no place for the usual natural implications of loss and transience. On the contrary, these blooms are plucked for a future consummation. God in this passage is specifically affirming his absolute qualities and the Minnebett not only transcends, but is opposite in kind from the earthly model. In Mechthild's poem the whole Baumgarten der Minne is made into an allegorical second Eden in which the Fall is systematically undone and complete harmony restored. Each element of this definitive locus amoenus is identified for the reader in a new sense. The secretiveness of the lovers which had been for Walther a social necessity here comments on the incapacity for language to contain the experience. By contrast to the case of the lovers in Tristan which was described in an almost equally idealized way but which provided so brief a respite, for Mechthild the plucked flowers of divine love bear an absolute value and can suggest no sense of loss. Again, the specific associations of the image are directly reversed.
     Finally, the dew is used by medieval German poets as well as by those of other epochs as a standard poetic image of the delicate and beautiful but short-lived appeal of earthly love. Its fructifying dampness is qualified by its rapid evaporation. Examples are many. [28] Mechthild's appropriation of the image has ample Biblical precedent, so it will be clear that her poetic usage is not idiosyncratic.[29]


How God Comes into the Soul
I come to my lover like
Dew on the flower. [30]


     Here the English reader will inevitably recall the lyric "I sing of a maiden," in which the image in used with a similar tenderness and charm, though hardly with the breathtaking immediacy of Mechthild's couplet. But in each of these cases, the semantic areas of ephemerality, of superficiality, of elegy are lost since the divine consolation is eternal. What, then, can be the point of making an image work against itself? To be sure, Mechthild speaks of the dew in other contexts in which the problem does not arise [31], but when it does, can she simply be discarding the bulk of the meaning of the phrase?
     The whole medieval hermeneutic habit and Mechthild's frequent references to alchemy, numerology, and the “strangeness” of her book [32] might seem to resolve the problem. She may have anticipated an esoteric interpretation which would seek to ignore the apparent significance of her words, pursuing only their coded meaning. This explanation, however, denies any special efficacy to her strategy, reducing it to a historical curiosity.
     Late in her book, in a section composed during her reflective residence at Helfde, she expresses a conceptual base that provides a second solution to the problematic images. God is speaking: "Whoever knows and loves the nobility of my freedom could not bear to love me alone on my account — he must love me rather in created things. In that way I remain closest to his soul." [33] Though she was by no means a theologian, this sort of assumption implies that the things of this world are to be not merely accepted, but celebrated with recognition but without apology for their shortcomings. The very inexactness of correspondence between the things of the creation and God may be read as itself significant. The pattern of poetic metaphor in relation to its intended object would then define the relation between Mechthild, her art, and the entire creation and God. The failure of the poetic image to deliver what it promises is then meaningful, and what had seemed imprecision becomes greater precision. The incongruity of the image becomes significant of the failure of language and this in turn of the failure of the flesh.
     Even this explanation remains wholly within thematics, but it leads to an issue rich in theoretical implications for literature and for the understanding of language itself. Referentiality and representation in language have been debated continuously, but the last several decades have seen more radical attempts to deny all signification to the written word. Writers have been thought to be doing their proper work primarily when drawing attention to this very inability. This notion surely causes the reader of medieval texts to look with a new eye on what is generally called the modesty topos (in which the author protests his inability to carry out his project adequately) and the special form of this topos common in mystical literature (and, indeed, in religious writing generally) in which the writer insists that language is wholly unable to convey the information he would like to express. Many of the modernist self-reflective devices of contemporary fiction writers have early precedent in these medieval authorial concessions that the text can do little justice to the topic.
     The fact is that literature seems unable to rest easily either altogether within or without referentiality. The best critical opinions have often stressed the ambiguity of the relation, as when Hesiod's muses declared to him that they could both tell the truth and lie, or when Eco defines the sign as that which is capable of falsehood, or in recent deconstructive criticism. Just as Mechthild's imagery can indicate the gap between the indescribable divine, the ultimate reality, and the earthly mortal is mediated, evaluated, magnified, but never eliminated by systems of poetic language, the writer on any subject will find a gap between the "reality" to which he plays the game of referring and the words which must serve to do the job. The space between signifier and signified had been perceived as far back as linguistic records go, but it is acutely present in a text like Mechthild's where the failure of language is a central theme. Read as a commentary on language's lagging race to catch up with its subjects, the wistful tone of the problematic images returns with a new meaning, a lament for exile from a linguistic Eden, from an imaginary prelapsarian golden age of language when words could reflect the world. This fall parallels without replacing those other falls which have wrung tears from flesh, but it, too, can be treated as a fortunate fall for just as Adam's sin made history possible, the fall of language is the precondition for literature.


NOTES
1. The term is Geoffrey's, but the concept is common to him, Matthew, John of Garland, and their classical antecedents.

2. This is the usual form of the title, though the most convenient edition today is Mechthild von Magdeburg, Offenbarungen der Schwester Mechthild von Magdeburg oder Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit, ed. P. Gall Morel (Regensburg, 1869; rpt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963). As this book is a collection of brief lyrics rather than a continuous text, reference will be to the individual poem with the part (Theil) specified by Roman numeral and the item by Arabic.

3. The one book-length literary study is James Franklin, Mystical Transformations (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978). Franklin is primarily concerned with tracing and describing image patterns.

4. See, for instance, Jeanne Ancelet-Hustache, Mechthilde de Magdebourg 1207-1282, etude de psychologie religieuse (Paris: Ancienne Honore Champion,1926).

5. This category would include, for instance, the "St. Trudperter Hohenlied," the "Melker Marienlied," and the "Mariensequenz aus Muri."

6. This depiction is implicit throughout the book, but it is most evident in Mechthild I, 11; I, 46; and II, 23. Passages which imply sexual union are Mechthild I, 3; I, 19; I, 22; I, 44; II, 3; II, 19; II, 23.

7. Examples of the Gruss in this sense abound. Among them are Kaiser Heinrich's "Ich grueze mit gesange die suezen" and Friedrich von Hausen's "Wafena, wie hat mich Minne gelazen." To simplify my references to Minnesang, I cite them all from the collection by Max Wehrli, Deutsche Lyrik des Mittelalters (Zurich: Manesse Verlag, 1955). Thus Kaiser Heinrich's poem is Wehrli, p. 87 and Friedrich's is Wehrli, p. 93. Note also the earlier example, in Latin with certain key words in German "Dixit: 'Die illi de me corde fideli,’" Wehrli, p. 26.

8. Mechthild I, 14.

9. Mechthild II, 23.

10. Mechthild II, 25

11. Mechthild II, 19. Quotations from Mechthild within the text will be my own literal translations. The originals will be found in the notes as here: Der ware gottes grus/ Der da kunt von der himelschen blut.

12. Wehrli, p. 171.

13. In Mechthild I, 44 and II, 3 for example.

14. This is the very beginning of the book. The text reads: DIS BUCH SOL MAN GERNE ENPFAN, WAN GOT SPRICHET SELBER DIE WORT. Dis buch das sende ich nun ze botten alien geistlichen luten, beidv bosen und guten, wand wen die sule valient, so mag das werk nut gestan, und ez bezeichnet alleine mich, und meldet loblich mine heimlichkeit.