I. Robert Frost's echoes of other poets. II. The tactile values of Bernard Berenson. III. Speech of touch in the English Renaissance

Part one is a study of Robert Frost as a literary poet. Frost's hints in letters and talks of his relations to other poets have not been examined carefully enough. Consequently, the subtle but pervasive influence of other poets on Frost's experiments with voice and sentence sounds remains undervalued. I study this influence from three angles. First, I discuss a number of echoes in "Mowing," chiefly that of Andrew Lang's "Scythe Song." The literary heritage of one of Frost's most characteristic poems suggests that we revise our sense of what is "characteristic" about his New England voice. In the second section of the essay, I explore Frost's debt to the blank verse of William Dean Howells in North of Boston. I show that the latter's The Mother and the Father (1909) significantly marks the voice of "Home Burial." Finally, I examine Frost's echoes of Tennyson over the entire course of Frost's career. Parallels between the two poets are drawn, and the particular echoes through which Frost embodies Tennyson's influence are described.;The second part is an interpretive account of Bernard Berenson's notion of "tactile values." My aim is to highlight the influences of Emerson and William James (particularly the latter) on Berenson's physiological conception of the work of art. I take the view that "tactile values" can be perceived in writing as much as in painting, and that Berenson's aesthetic displays the tactile character of a fundamentally literary imagination.;The third part is a lecture about the image of scorn in the English Renaissance. "Speech of touch," a phrase of Bacon's, is taken as a general name for any speech that articulates what we might call "character assassination." I discuss duelling in Jacobean England as it relates to the discourse of honor. I critique the honorific notion of "self-fashioning" from the point of view of scorn and detraction.