This anthology has a double aim: to present a body of poetry, none of it easily available, some of it never before reproduced, and to point up a particular trend, until now nearly lost sight of in the maze of generalizations about eighteenth-century French poetry. This trend, called individualist, in contradistinction to the academic and universalist trends of the century, has been chosen since it is the least known and most original of the three. The individualist poets are avowed moderns, and their attitude toward poetry and their concept of its nature often anticipate attitudes held by our poets of our own time. There has not been available to this point a sufficiently representative body of poems by these poets, a gap that Professors Finch and Joliat have attempts to fill with their anthology. Readers will find the notes to the poems especially useful, since many of them provide out-of-the-way background material and, as well, offer new insights into the poetry of the individualist poets as a group.

It has long been the custom to condemn eighteenth-century French poetry outright as generally unworthy of attention. However, in keeping with a recent change of attitude towards this vast and diverse body of literature, Professor Finch here undertakes to isolate a certain group of poets, belonging to the first half of the century, who may appropriately be called individualistes and who are in various ways characteristic of a definite and important trend of their time. The authors he has chosen were selected from the larger group of individualists because each provides, in addition to his poems, a complete statement of his own conception of poetry and of that conception which is common to the group as a whole. Since the works treated are comparatively unfamiliar the author has considered them from a historical and an analytical as well as a critical point of view. In addition he has devoted three special chapters to a literary historian (Evrard Titon du Tillet) and to three critical theorists (Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Yves-Marie André, and Charles Batteux) whose contemporary writings, while they may or may not have influenced the poets here examined, support, reflect, or confirm their ideas and practice. Texts of these poets are not easily available and the numerous representative quotations from the poems given in this book will be welcomed by the reader.

Francisco de la Torre has long been praised as an outstanding poet in the mould of Garcilaso de la Vega and his simplicity of style and soft, gentle, Arcadian environment of his poetry have been emphasized. In this volume Professor Hughes attempts to define more accurately the position of Francisco de la Torre's verse in the evolution of Spanish poetry in the sixteenth century, revealing that Torre's vision of the pastoral world and his poetic language show him to be a transitional poet of considerable quality and substance and not merely an imitator of Garcilaso. Hughes demonstrates that while some of Torre's poetry follows a general pastoral pattern, his descriptions are characterized by a sense of movement through a shifting perspective and that even in poems with a traditional pastoral setting, the descriptions sometimes negate the pastoral qualities. The author also shows that Torre, rather than looking back towards Garcilaso and his contemporaries, is already anticipating – especially in his stylistic technique and in his view of nature – the attitude of the seventeenth century.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France were witness to dramatic changes in all aspects of social and cultural life. During this era, a new and modern spirit of critical inquiry arose, a change in ethos that had a major effect on all the arts. French Musical Thought, 1600-1800 is a diverse collection of essays offering new perspectives and insight on musical opinion during one of the most fascinating periods in French history. The essays in this volume, the authors of which include musicologists, historians and literary scholars, illuminate clearly the relationship of critical thought in music to contemporary developments in philosophy, art, literature and politics. In the final analysis, scholars contend that music aesthetics, criticism and theory can be understood only against the backdrop of a dynamic cultural milieu.Contributors: Claude V. Palisca, Jane R. Stevens, Louis E. Auld, Gloria Flaherty, Robert M. Isherwood, Albert Cohen, Barbara Russano Hanning, David Allen Duncan, Charles Dill, Georgia Cowart.

Richard A. Brooks, general editor, v.

For centuries Latin served as an international language for scholars in Europe. Yet as early as the first half of the seventeenth century, scholars, philosophers, and scientists were beginning to turn their attention to the possibility of formulating a totally new universal language. This wide-ranging book focuses upon the role that it was thought an ideal, universal, constructed language would play in the advancement of learning. The first section examines seventeenth-century attempts to establish a universal 'common writing' or, as Bishop Wilkins called it, a 'real character and philosophical language.' This movement involved or interested scientists and philosophers as distinguished as Descartes, Mersenne, Comenius, Newton, Hooke, and Leibniz. The second part of the book follows the same theme through to the final years of the eighteenth century, where the implications of language-building for the progress of knowledge are presented as part of the wider question which so interested French philosophers, that of the influence of signs on thought. The author also includes a chapter tracing the frequent appearance of ideal languages in French and English imaginary voyages, and an appendix on the idea that gestural signs might supply a universal language. This work is intended as a contribution to the history of ideas rather than of linguistics proper, and because it straddles several disciplines, will interest a wide variety of reader. It treats comprehensively a subject that has not previously been adequately dealt with, and should become the standard work in its field.